


Haul Away, You Rolling Queens

by RushingHeadlong



Series: Sail On Together [1]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Lighthouse keeper John, Magic, Nautical & Merman AU, Old Age, Sailing, Sailor Roger, Sea Witch Brian, Siren Freddie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23719312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RushingHeadlong/pseuds/RushingHeadlong
Summary: It was Freddie who told them stories of the Kingdom of Rhye, an ancient mer kingdom that once ruled the seven seas before disappearing a thousand years ago. According to Brian it was just a myth, but Freddie was always certain that it was real and waiting to be discovered - but he never found proof of it before he fell sick, and vanished suddenly without a trace.Now, 25 years later, Roger stumbles across a new clue that could lead them to Rhye - one with unexplained ties to their lost friend. But convincing Brian and John to take a leap of faith and join him in one final adventure is only the first hurdle. If they want to weather the rough seas ahead, they’ll have to not only sail into the unknown but finally face the unanswered questions and lingering grief left from Freddie’s disappearance.
Relationships: John Deacon & Brian May & Freddie Mercury & Roger Taylor, John Deacon & Brian May & Roger Taylor, background Jim Hutton/Freddie Mercury
Series: Sail On Together [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017217
Comments: 48
Kudos: 58





	1. Prologue - The Siren

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first AU I’ve written in nearly a decade and I have @tenderbri to thank for giving me the inspiration and encouragement to tackle this project, and cheering me along as I wrote this ♥ This whole fic is already written and I’ll be uploading chapters (hopefully) daily. 
> 
> It should go without saying that this is a work of fiction, albeit one with a focus on the loss of Freddie which Roger, Brian, and John are still dealing with in their own complicated and sometimes messy ways. I am not making any claims that what they say or do in this story is in any way representative of their real-life emotions nor is this fic intending to pass judgment on any real-life actions they may (or may not) have taken.
> 
> Also, I’ve also intentionally avoided setting this fic in any specific time period, but Roger, Brian, and John are all older here (mid- to late-60s) and there are relevant discussions of and references to the aging process as well.
> 
> November 2020: Minor edits for spelling/grammar/missing words.

_45 years ago..._

It’s late, and Roger can’t sleep - but that isn’t necessarily anything unusual. 

It’s his first night ashore in several weeks and adjusting to being back on land is always difficult. His body just doesn’t quite know what to do with itself without the constant motion of the sea under his feet. The stillness of land feels unnatural and John had laughed at the way Roger swayed when they met at the pub, as if his legs were still compensating for the ceaseless rolling of waves. 

The several hours of nursing drinks with his friend hadn’t helped the swaying at all, but neither had it done enough to lull Roger to sleep. He still feels wide awake as he says goodnight to John at the end of their evening. Even though John offers up his spare bed, as he usually does when Roger was back ashore, Roger declines and instead makes his way down to the water. 

Behind him the town is quiet, only the faint sounds of a few drunken patrons stumbling home audible in the distance, a few lighted windows shining out as beacons into the darkness. The lamp on the nearby lighthouse flashes red, illuminating the waves with crimson beams, and Roger counts out the beats - _six seconds on, six seconds off_ \- a familiar rhythm that he keeps tapping against his leg as he walks. 

Further out at sea another lighthouse blinks bright white at steady intervals, a small spot of light in the otherwise inky blackness of the ocean at night. Even the wharf seems to disappear off into the darkness as Roger steps out onto it - but Roger doesn’t mind. The salt in the air and the sound of the waves lapping against the pier are familiar comforts to him. 

He has always been more at ease when he’s surrounded by the sea, and if he had his way he’d still be on the water now. Roger had gotten wind of a treasure chest supposedly buried down on the southern coast and he’s itching to go and try to find it, but his ship had taken a beating in a recent storm and she’ll need repairs before Roger can set off again. 

For now she’s docked here on the wharf, and Roger takes a moment to double-check his knots tying his boat in place. They’re secure - as he knew they would be - but it at least gives him something to do to distract him from the hour and his insomnia. 

While Roger is crouched down he hears a faint sound, something that seems out of place for the ocean at night. It sounds like the wind whistling along the coast or the faint calling of gulls, but slightly _off_ somehow, like something only trying to disguise itself as the natural sounds of the sea. It sends a chill down Roger’s spine that’s made worse by the realization that the noise - whatever it is - is coming from underneath the pier itself.

Roger wouldn’t consider himself a timid man by any means, but he goes still with fear as his brain quickly tries to identify what the unnatural noise could be. If it’s a sea creature, it’s not one Roger has ever heard before. Maybe it’s something hurt, and making some odd noises because of pain and fear? Or maybe it isn’t alive at all, just something scraping against a rock or a piece of debris being rocked against the pier by the waves?

It’s none of those things. 

It takes a minute, but eventually Roger realizes that the noise he’s hearing is, of all things… _singing_.

“ _I am forever searching high and low, but why does everybody tell me no?”_

The voice is soft but clear and hauntingly beautiful, with the hinting of something powerful behind the quiet words, something almost _dangerous_ that makes Roger shiver to hear. It’s like watching a shark circling and knowing that he’s only safe so long as it chooses not to attack - but unlike with a shark Roger doesn’t move away to safety. He stays, rooted to the spot, as he strains to keep listening to the song.

“ _Neptune of the seas, an answer for me please-”_

A sudden loud _splash_ interrupts the song, followed by a soft but emphatic, “Oh, damn it!” and then silence. 

Roger feels like a spell has been lifted off of him as the song abruptly ends and he lurches forward, stumbling towards the edge of the pier and falling to his knees. He leans over the edge to try to catch sight of whoever was singing.

“Hello?” he calls out. “Anyone there?” 

There’s no response and it’s so dark underneath the pier that Roger can’t see anything in the water. The singing may have been unnerving at first, but now Roger finds himself uneasy about it’s sudden absence and he calls out again, a little more hesitantly, “H-hello?”

Something breaks the surface of the water in front of him and suddenly there are _eyes_ locked onto Roger’s. He yelps and scrambles back from the edge in shock. 

The person pulls themself up out of the water, just enough that their head and upper body are visible. It’s a man, or at least something that looks like one, with shoulder-length dark hair and dark eyes, and a necklace of iridescent shells looped around his neck and hanging down over a bare chest. “Sorry,” he apologizes. “I didn’t know anyone else was out here.”

“What are _you_ even doing out here?” Roger asks. His heart is still hammering in his chest and he doesn’t move any closer to the mysterious stranger. 

The man holds up a small net bag, half-full of cockles. “Collecting shells,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. 

“But you’re not supposed to be swimming around the wharf, _especially_ not at night!” Roger says.

“Well I can hardly swim around here during the day! People might see me!”

“Maybe don’t go swimming in dangerous off-limit areas, then it wouldn’t matter if people saw you!”

There’s another loud splash that makes Roger jump, and the stranger ducks his head to hide a laugh. “Now, where would the fun be in that?” the stranger asks. Even in the dark Roger can see that his eyes are twinkling with amusement. “Besides, what are _you_ doing out here at night, hm? Up to no good yourself, are you?”

“I am not!” Roger says hotly. “I just... I couldn’t sleep. I don’t like being on land, I’d rather be out at sea right now.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

“My ship needs repairs.” 

Roger doesn’t know why he’s talking to this stranger, but the longer the conversation continues the more he finds himself starting to relax. It’s hard to believe that the man he’s talking to, with the wet hair and an overbite that he clearly tries to hide, is the source of the mysterious and otherworldly singing that Roger heard just a few minutes earlier. 

“Well, I suppose that is a shame. Though, honestly, sometimes I wish I could spend more time on land than I do. If my talents were more like Brian’s, maybe...” The stranger shakes his head. “But nevermind. That’s not important.”

The stranger’s comments don’t make sense to Roger, but he’s still curious and he asks, “Is Brian a friend of yours then?” There isn’t anyone he knows of in town by that name - but, then again, with how often he’s out to sea he can’t be sure that someone didn’t move in while he was away. After all, he's certainly not seen this man before, so who's to say that there aren't other newcomers that he hasn't met yet?

“Mm, yes, he is. But he doesn’t get out this way very often. I keep trying to get him to explore the the world a bit more, but he’s too busy with his pet projects and too stubborn to listen to me,” the stranger says, rolling his eyes. 

“Sounds like my friend, John,” Roger says with a small shake of his head. “You’d think being a fisherman he’d be interesting in going treasure hunting with me sometimes, but I swear I’d have an easier time scraping barnacles from this pier than getting him to leave his nets!” Roger loves John like a brother, and to his credit he has tagged along in the past when Roger desperately needed the help, but it doesn’t happen as frequently as Roger wished it did. 

“Treasure hunting?” the stranger perks up in interest. “Are you a pirate, then?”

Roger can’t help himself and he laughs at the suggestion. “Not hardly! I’m not one for pillaging and sinking ships. I just have a knack for finding buried treasure. I suppose you could argue that I’m stealing from pirates, but it’s not like they got fairly in the first place so I don’t feel guilty about it.”

“Still, that sounds like a rather exciting life you lead.”

Roger shrugs. “It’s alright. I usually don't encounter the pirates and most of what I find is hardly worth the cost of melting it back down to ore - but it gets me by. Oh, and I’m Roger, by the way. Roger Taylor.” He holds out his hand to the stranger. “Figured we’ve been talking long enough now that you should know that.”

The stranger leans up further out of the water and shakes Roger’s hand. “I’m Freddie Mercury. It’s been lovely chatting with you.” 

Freddie’s hand is wet with saltwater and surprisingly cold, even considering the temperature of the ocean this time of year. Roger shivers at the initial contact, and not entirely because of the unexpected chill, but he ignores the feeling of wrongness and says, “It’s been nice talking to you too- though, I still think you’re crazy for swimming out here at night.”

Freddie laughs again, and there’s another loud splash - only this time, now that Roger is closer to the edge of the pier, he can see a large, white tail flicking out of the water. 

“Get out of the water!” he yelps as he scrambles back from the edge. “There’s something swimming around you!”

But instead of climbing onto the pier alongside Roger, Freddie lets go of the edge and ducks slightly further into the water. “It’s fine, darling, there’s nothing else here,” Freddie says quickly - a little _too_ quickly, and all of Roger’s instincts start screaming that something is very, very wrong here.

“Bullshit!” Roger snaps. “I saw that tail, I know I did!” Roger sees Freddie mouth _shit_ to himself, and duck a little further down in the water. “You need to get out, there could be a shark out there or… or…”

Or what? Roger only got a glimpse of it but he saw enough to know that it wasn’t really a shark, and couldn’t be dolphin, and the water is too shallow for it to be a whale. Roger may not be a grizzled old sailor yet, but he’s grown up on the ocean and he knows - he _knows_ \- that tail isn’t from any normal sea creature found in these parts. 

A faint memory stirs in the back of his mind of a tale told late at night to scare little children, a tale of a creature that’s half-human and half-fish. And with that thought, and the memory of Freddie insisting that there was nothing else in the water with him, the puzzle pieces start to fall into place. 

“Oh,” he says softly, looking down at Freddie with an entirely new understanding. “It’s _you_ , isn’t it? You’re a merman.”

"So what if I am?" Freddie snaps. He's clearly on the defensive, not quite panicked but visibly bracing himself to flee beneath the water if he has to. "I'm a siren as well as a mer, so if you try anything I'll- I'll sing you off this pier and drown you!"

"Of course- of _course_ you're a siren!" Roger says, almost to himself. Everything is finally starting to make sense now. "That explains the singing I heard earlier!"

"You heard me singing?" Freddie asks. He pops back up slightly, his wariness now replaced with open worry. "Shit, I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"What? No!" Roger says immediately. He's baffled by the very suggestion, until he remembers the unearthly tone to Freddie's singing that seemed to hold Roger in place and made him unable to leave until the song was broken. 

"I didn't want to leave while you were singing," Roger tells him. "But, actually, now that you mention it…" He frowns and tries to think back to what it had been like when he first heard Freddie's voice drifting through the dark. "I don't think I could have left, even if I wanted to."

“Shit,” Freddie says again. “I’m so sorry darling, I don’t always have the best control over when I enchant my singing."

"But you just- you threatened to use your voice to drown me just now!" Roger says.

"Yes, well, I was just bluffing!" Freddie admits, clearly flustered.

And at that Roger bursts out laughing. It catches Freddie off-guard and he looks at Roger a bit like he thinks he's lost his mind, but after a few moments he starts chuckling as well.

It should be odd, standing here on the dock in the middle of night, laughing with a merman… but somehow it feels quite natural to Roger, as if he's already known Freddie for years instead of mere minutes.

"I really am sorry, Roger. For threatening you and for enchanting you to listen to my singing earlier," Freddie apologizes once their laughter dies down.

"It’s alright. You do have quite a good voice, you know," Roger tells him.

"Oh, I know," Freddie says, with a wave of his hand - and, behind him, his tail swishes in a wide arc out of the water to mirror the movement. “I just need to get a better control of my abilities, that’s all. I want my audiences captivated because of how wonderful I sound, not because they don’t have any say in the matter!”

“As someone on the receiving end of your _captivating_ singing, I think I’d like that too,” Roger jokes, though he yawns halfway through despite his attempts to smother it. “Sorry about that. Guess my body’s trying to tell me that I’ve been awake too long.”

“You should sleep then,” Freddie tells him. “It’s never good for a sailor to be sleep-deprived on the ocean.”

Roger won’t be on the ocean for a few days yet, until his ship is sea-worthy again, but he supposes Freddie does have a point. “Yeah, alright.” He stands up and stretches out with a small groan. “Hey, will I see you again?”

Freddie cocks his head and gives him a curious look. “Do you _want_ to see me again?”

“Of course,” Roger says without hesitation. “Why wouldn’t I? You’re only about the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

Freddie laughs and says, “And you’re not a bore yourself, Mr. Not-Quite-A-Pirate. Yes, I think we’ll be seeing each other again - and maybe I’ll introduce you to my friend Brian, if I can convince him to leave his cove.”

“Well maybe I’ll bring John along then too, and really make it a party,” Roger says around another yawn. “Same time tomorrow night, then?”

“Sounds like a dream, darling,” Freddie says, and with a quick wave goodbye he disappears beneath the dock again. 

In the morning, it _does_ sound like a dream. Roger wakes up in the cabin of his ship and wonders if he didn’t imagine the meeting altogether in a fit of sleep deprived hallucination. “I mean, mermen? Sirens?” he mumbles to himself as he throws on clean clothes. “Pull yourself together, Taylor. You’re starting to lose it.”

But when Roger climbs up on his deck, there’s something new waiting for him there: a single, iridescent shell with a hole drilled through one end, as if primed to be worn as a necklace - or recently removed from one. And when Roger picks it up he can see that the inside is carved with the simple initials, _F.M._

Roger stares down at it and he knows now that he didn’t imagine the mysterious siren from the night before - though that doesn’t ease all of his confusion.

“How in the hell did he get this on my ship?”


	2. The Shell

The chest is old and waterlogged - very much like how Roger feels himself as he prises it out from where it’s been wedged underneath a rock in the tidal pools. It had been partially buried in the sand and Roger had spent the last few hours trying to dig it out as the hole filled with water and repeatedly collapsed around him.

Now that it’s free Roger leans heavily on his shovel, still ankle-deep in water and feeling exhausted down to his very bones. He stares down at the chest and can’t help but feel like it wasn’t really worth the effort to retrieve. He’s been treasure hunting for almost fifty years now and knows not to trust a book - or a chest - by it’s cover, but this one is rotted from years of being half-buried in the water and Roger isn’t optimistic that it’s contents have weathered the ages well.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” he mutters. John has been trying to convince him for years to retire, or at least take up a job that was less dangerous, and Roger is starting to wonder if his friend might have the right idea.

With a small groan Roger picks up the chest and makes his way out of the rocks and back onto the thin strip of sand that passes for the beach. He’s not as nimble as he was when he was younger and it shows in his movements, with Roger almost tripping and falling onto his face more than once. He drops the chest with a heavy _thump_ , wincing as one of the hinges breaks in the process, and kneels down in front of it to open it and finally see what’s inside.

But he stops, hands hovering over the lid, as his eyes spot a small mark carved into the wood next to the lock. It’s faint, worn with age, but Roger immediately recognizes the familiar four-point crown. It’s an unexpected sight, but one that makes his heart ache with a grief that hasn’t been numbed even after almost 25 years.

“Freddie…”

He traces his fingers gently over the lines of a mark that he never thought he’d find again. He’d picked up most of Freddie’s old treasure caches himself in the first few years after Freddie disappeared, before they could be found and ravaged by others who wouldn’t appreciate them for the priceless treasures they were. It’s been years since he’s stumbled across one accidentally, and Roger had no idea that Freddie had ever hidden anything this far from their usual haunts. They always talked about searching Boon Island for treasure, but it had never happened while Freddie was with them and the island is so difficult to access that Roger had been putting it off for as long as possible.

Maybe this was a hiding spot that Freddie found early on, and could never be bothered to return to once he realized how difficult it was to get out here? Or maybe there’s something particularly valuable here, and if that’s the case Roger is definitely curious to know what Freddie would have deemed important enough to leave here and then never speak of again.

Whatever the reason for Freddie hiding something out here, on a rocky island barely accessible to anyone, it makes Roger a bit more excited to open up the chest and see what’s inside. It takes hardly any effort at all to break off the rusted lock and he eagerly lifts the lid, expecting to see the usual sorts of “treasure” that Freddie would stash away - scrimshaws and shell jewelry and the occasional rare human antique thought lost to the ocean long ago.

The chest is half-filled with ancient coins, most worn down to a sludge of unrecognizable rusted metal. If that was all that there was Roger would be cursing up a storm, because it’s hardly enough to make his efforts today worthwhile. Luckily, there’s something else in the chest - something far more important.

Sitting on top of the coins is a small bundle wrapped carefully in old oilcloth, clearly added to the chest much later than everything else. It’s this bundle that Roger pulls out, handling it as if it was the most precious treasure in existence - because to him, it is. It doesn’t matter what’s inside, Roger will not be parting with it for any amount of money in the world.

“It” ends up being a nautilus shell, bleached white by the sun years ago, and as Roger pulls it free from the cloth he feels a small twinge of disappointment that it’s not something, well, _more_. More personal, or more ornate - something that spoke to it being _Freddie’s_ , besides the mere circumstances of its discovery.

And then Roger turns the shell over in his hands and nearly drops it back into the chest in shock.

There’s a series of delicate etchings on one side of the shell. It’s the beginnings of a scrimshaw piece that was never finished, but Roger recognizes the outline of the design immediately: A large “Q”, with two sailors on either side and two mermen at their feet, an octopus perched on top and a seagull stretching its wings wide as a backdrop.

It’s _their_ symbol, their crest, the one Freddie had designed ages ago, back in the beginning of their friendship when they were all young and full of life and a love of adventure. Sailors for Roger and John, and sirens for Freddie, with Brian depicted in his octopus form and the bird to bridge the divide between the land and the sea.

It’s also the last scrimshaw that Freddie had been working on, the one that was going to be the grandest of them all - and the one that he took with him when he disappeared.

“How the hell did this end up _here_?” Roger mutters aloud, still staring down at it with a mix of amazement and confusion.

The crown carved into the chest would suggest that it was Freddie himself who put the unfinished scrimshaw here… but Freddie was sick when he left, and none of them thought he had the strength to swim this far away from where they had holed up to wait out his final days.

Was that why they could never find any clue to where he went? They spent days searching for him after he vanished, but even though they expanded their search radius beyond what was optimistic it still didn’t come close to reaching the rocky little island where Roger finds himself now.

But if Freddie did make it this far… if he maybe made it _further_ …

A twinge of old hope starts to stir in Roger’s heart, because they never did find any sign of Freddie after he left, so maybe…

No.

Roger forces those dangerous thoughts back down. He had hoped, for longer than he probably should have, that Freddie had somehow beaten the odds... but after 25 years Roger knows that his friend is truly gone now - and he’s not sure that he wants to find anything that may be left, after all that time.

Roger absentmindedly turns the shell over in his hands as he thinks back to Freddie working on the scrimshaw. It had given Freddie something to do to pass the time, once his illness really became noticeable and they stopped sailing out of the cove. Those last few months are still painful for Roger to remember, but he can’t help but smile as he remembers the hours Freddie spent agonizing over which shell to use and sketching out design mockups along the deck of Roger’s boat before he began doing any actual carving at all. Those, at least, are happier memories.

Roger is still lost in thought when something unexpected catches his eye. There’s something carved on the inside of the shell that he didn’t notice before. Roger rubs his thumb over it, clearing away the sand that had found its way inside the bundle over the years until he can read the words written there.

_FIND RHYE._

The letters are scratchy and uneven, as if they were carved in a hurry, and they’re so different from Freddie’s usual technique that Roger isn’t even sure if it’s his doing at all. But any mention of Rhye would have to come from a mer, not a human, and there aren’t many of those left in these waters.

In fact, Roger hasn’t even heard any mention of Rhye since Freddie disappeared. It was Freddie who would spend hours regaling them with the stories of the fallen mer kingdom that once ruled over the seven seas. According to Brian it was probably just a legend, but Freddie was convinced that it was real and waiting to be found.

The four of them spent years happily chasing down every new lead that Freddie found to the location of the lost capital city, the so-called Heart of Rhye. But the adventures stopped when they lost Freddie, and John hid himself away and Brian devoted himself to his magic and Roger… Well, Roger was left to do what he’s always done - hunt down buried treasure.

Except now he does it alone, instead of with his friends by his side.

He certainly feels alone now, kneeling on the sand and staring down at the shell cradled gently in his hands. There’s a mystery to all of this and he wishes the others were here to help him solve it, but without their advice all Roger can do is hold the shell up to the sun and try to see if there are any other details he missed that might give him more information about who added those words - whether it be Freddie or someone else altogether. He rotates it to get a better look and, as he moves it, the inside of the shell starts to _glow_ \- so faintly at first that Roger almost misses it, but it steadily shines brighter until it’s almost blinding to look at.

He lowers it in shock and the light disappears immediately. “What the fuck,” he says to himself and he raises the shell again, much slower and much more cautiously this time.

The light returns and Roger raises and lowers the shell a few times, trying to figure out what exactly is going on. It doesn’t take him long to realize that, for some reason, it only glows when the opening of the shell is angled towards the south - and when pointed towards a specific spot, the words themselves glow bright gold.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he repeats. It’s mer-magic, it has to be, but he has no idea what it’s doing attached to a piece of Freddie’s scrimshaw.

And there’s only one person he can think of who might be able to give him any sort of explanation.

Finding Brian is almost as difficult as unearthing the treasure chest had been, though at least sailing to his friend’s cove is less strenuous than the digging. Roger sets his anchor and as he watches it disappear down into the water beneath him he keeps an eye out for his friend.

“Hey! Brian!” he calls out, though he knows that Brian won’t be able to hear him if he’s underwater. So he instead grabs a handful of the beach stones that he keeps in a bucket aboard his ship for this very purpose and starts throwing them into the water one by one. “Brian! Get up here! I found something!”

There’s a flash of red deep beneath the surface and Roger, grinning, tosses the rest of the rocks back into the bucket just as Brian surfaces in front of him. “Rog! Good to see you again!” Brian calls up to him, pushing his wet curls out of his face. “You’re lucky I’m around actually, I’ve been spending the last few days further out west trying to expand the wards again.”

“Don’t let John hear about that, or the two of you will end up in another fight about your magic encroaching on the fishermen’s only source of income,” Roger warns. He understands why Brian wants to protect the creatures that he shares the ocean with but John, who used to be a fisherman himself, has gotten into more than one argument with Brian on behalf of the humans who need to make a living on the sea.

“Well John doesn’t have anything to worry about it because it’s still not working,” Brian says, and underneath the water Roger can see his tail swishing in frustration. “I just can’t figure out what the problem is, if I’m not anchoring the spells properly or if I’m stretching myself too thin or-”

“I found one of Freddie’s treasure caches today,” Roger cuts in, before Brian can get himself too worked up or distract Roger from the reason why he’s here.

That gets Brian’s attention and he perks up a little bit more, eyes shining with visible interest. “You did? Where?”

“Added to an old human treasure chest out on Boon Island,” Roger tells him.

Brian cocks his head, clearly trying to remember where that is. “That’s the one way down the coast, isn’t it? You always said you’d investigate it one day but after all this time I thought you’d just written it off.” Brian frowns, confused, and adds, “I didn’t know Freddie ever ventured out that far.”

“Neither did I,” Roger says. “But it was his mark on the chest, and this was inside.” Roger pulls the nautilus shell out of his pocket and holds it up for Brian to see.

Brian squints, straining to see what Roger’s holding. “A shell?” he asks, clearly sounding as disappointed as Roger felt when he first saw it, before he realized what it really was.

“It’s a bit more than that, mate.”

“I can’t see it from here,” Brian says, shaking his head. “Stand back, I’m going to come aboard.”

“No! No, let me grab a rope to haul you up, don’t do the-” Roger begins, but the water around Brian is already starting to glow with his magic.

No matter how many times Roger sees this happen it never gets any less unnerving. There’s always a moment halfway through Brian’s transformation, where he’s not quite a mer but not quite solidified into his other form yet, that still manages to turn Roger’s stomach. It’s in that split-second, when Roger looks into the water and sees not his friend but a mass of writhing tentacles, that he understands why sailors of old told stories of sea monsters lurking in the depths.

And then the moment passes and the shapeless form coalesces into a normal - albeit rather large - octopus.

Even in this form Brian’s age still shows. His once bright-red color is more muted, having faded over the years like the tail of his mer-form and his formerly brown hair, but he’s still as strong as ever as he reaches his tentacles out of the water and starts pulling himself up the side of Roger’s ship. His tentacles wrap around the railing, and Roger grimaces as he watches them cover the numerous carvings left behind by Freddie that decorate almost every surface of the ship.

“Why do you always do this?” Roger complains as Brian oozes onto the deck with a sickening sort of squelch. “Powers of transformation and you _always_ have to choose an octopus!”

Brian shifts back to his mer-form, the scales of his red tail flashing in the sunlight as he settles against the mast to help keep himself upright. “It’s that or legs, and at least with tentacles I can climb onto the ship under my own power.”

“I was going to grab a rope to help you aboard!”

“Roger, the only way I’ll let you haul me onto your ship using a rope is if I’m half-dead and too exhausted to hold another form.” It’s the same thing that Brian’s been saying for years and, so far, they’ve never found themselves in that position.

So Roger doesn’t feel bad about ignoring Brian’s comment and instead just tosses him the shell. “Here, take a look at this. Recognize it?”

Brian catches it and almost immediately drops it onto the deck in shock. He barely manages to fumble it and keep it in his hands as he says, with surprise evident in his voice, “There’s _magic_ in this!”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I brought it to you.” Roger leans back against the bulwark, crossing his arms and settling in to watch Brian as he starts to study the shell. “Do you know who enchanted it?”

“I don’t even know what it _does_. I can just feel the magic, and it doesn’t feel like anything I’ve encountered before,” Brian says. His hands are glowing slightly with his own magic and, although Roger can’t see anything happening, he knows that Brian is trying to figure out what the enchantment does.

“I think it’s supposed to show the way to something.” Roger points towards the south. “Angle the shell opening that way, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Brian frowns but does as Roger says, and as he lines the shell up in the direction that Roger is pointing it starts to glow, just as it did for Roger when he inspected it himself. “Interesting…” Brian murmurs as he rotates the shell, observing how the light grows and fades as it’s moved around. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. What would it even be pointing to?”

It’s at that moment that Brian finally catches sight of the words carved inside the shell. Roger knows that he sees them because he sighs and looks up at Roger, his curiosity replaced with a familiar mild annoyance as he just says, “Really?”

“Hey, I didn’t write that there!”

“But you think... what, that Freddie did?” Brian shakes his head. “Just because you found a reference to Rhye doesn’t mean that it’s from him. He didn’t have magic like this, and anyone could have carved a crown into that chest.” He holds the shell back out to Roger. “I’m sorry, Roger, but I don’t think this is actually his.”

Roger pushes himself off the bulwark and storms over to Brian. He snatches the shell out of his hand and turns it around so the scrimshaw is facing Brian. “Yeah, well, how do you explain this then?” Roger snaps.

Brian’s mouth drops open in surprise. He reaches out for the shell again but Roger doesn’t let go of it, and instead Brian just gently traces one finger over Freddie’s carvings. “Freddie took this with him, when he…” Brian says, his voice soft. He looks back up at Roger, fear and hope and heartbreak in his eyes, and asks, “Did you find anything else?”

“No,” Roger says, and as quick as it came on his brewing anger disappears again. “Just this.”

Brian lets out a shaky exhale and nods, just slightly. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. Not after all this time.” He gently grabs the shell and asks, “Can I see this again? Please?”

Roger lets go of the shell and Brian takes it carefully, holding it as delicately as if it were a fledgling sea bird with its life in his hands. “How did it end up on Boon Island, I wonder?” Brian asks, quietly, almost to himself. “Freddie was so sick, he couldn’t have swum that far…”

“Maybe we misjudged him.” If they did it’s a mistake now 25 years in the past, but that doesn’t do enough to help with the intense feelings of regret as Roger voices the possibility. “Maybe he did make it that far.”

“Or someone else put the shell there,” Brian counters. “Whoever enchanted it could have found it anywhere, and brought it to Boon Island to hide it.”

“Why though?” Roger asks. “Why would someone go through the effort of casting that spell only to hide it?”

“I have no idea,” Brian admits, still turning the shell over in his hands. Every time Brian’s movements accidentally make it align with the south the inside flashes with the same brilliant light. “It’s all rather strange, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Roger agrees. He crosses his arms, doing his best to feign nonchalance, and casually adds, “You know, it could be interesting to look into this a little more…”

“How?” Brian asks. “I wouldn’t even begin to know how to begin picking apart this spell, and there hasn’t been another mer around here since Freddie died.” Brian pauses, and frowns slightly as the implication of his words hits him. “Then who enchanted Freddie’s shell, I wonder…?”

“Maybe it _is_ Freddie, leaving us one last clue to follow to find Rhye,” Roger suggests lightly.

Brian snorts in dry amusement and shakes his head. “Not possible.”

“Why not?” Roger presses. “It’s Freddie’s scrimshaw. I found it under his mark. It references Rhye, and you always said that Freddie was one of the few mers you’d ever met who still genuinely believed that the lost kingdom was real!”

Brian gives Roger an unimpressed look. “So you really think Freddie, who never showed a single scrap of magical ability beyond his singing, somehow in his final days managed to enchant this shell with an incredibly powerful spell and hid it in the hopes that we would just happen to stumble across it and use it to find the location of a kingdom lost to legend?”

“Well when you put it like that, no,” Roger is forced to admit, but he’s not going to let Brian’s _logic_ stop him from making his bigger point. “But - look, whoever _did_ put the spell on Freddie’s scrimshaw is clearly a mer who is trying to give directions to _something_. And if there’s even the slightest chance that it’s pointing towards the lost Heart of Rhye… wouldn’t Freddie want us to investigate that?”

“No,” Brian says immediately, now that he knows what Roger is really suggesting. “No, absolutely not.”

“Come on, Brian!” Roger cajoles. “Don’t you miss sailing off into the great unknown on some wild adventure?”

“No,” Brian says again, but this time Roger can hear the lie in his voice. “Besides, I can’t just leave my projects or the animals here! I’m trying to expand my wards, and-”

“And maybe a break will do you some good!” Roger cuts in. “Take a few days off to check this out, and then come back to your projects with fresh eyes!”

Brian grumbles something probably uncharitable under his breath and his tail flaps hard against the deck in annoyance. “We don’t even know where that spell is actually trying to lead us. It’s probably going to be dangerous, and we aren’t as young as we once were.”

“That’s why I need you to come along with me,” Roger tells him. “I figure your defensive magic might be the only thing that keeps me alive during this little adventure.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Brian snaps. “Whoever enchanted that shell knows more about magic than I could ever hope of learning. I’m not going to be of much help to you here, Roger. At least not of a magical sort.”

“What about just company then?” Roger asks. “It’s been too long since we’ve done something like this together. You can try to deny it all you want, but I _know_ you miss the good old days as much as I do.”

Brian doesn’t respond to that immediately but he looks thoughtful, and Roger holds his breath as he waits for Brian to say something. Truthfully Roger knows that he can’t do this on his own - the danger is one thing, but more than that looking for Rhye was always something that belonged to the four of them. And Roger doesn’t think he can face going off on another Rhye adventure by himself.

“Have you asked John to go with you?” Brian asks after what feels like a small eternity of silence.

Roger lets out a sigh of relief, because he knows that he almost has Brian now. “He’s next on my list. I needed your opinion on the enchantment and… well…”

“You’re going to need my help to convince him to leave the lighthouse,” Brian says. He sighs and shakes his head, his white curls dancing around his shoulders at the movement. “He’s not going to go for this. You know that, right?”

“He might!” Roger protests. “Just because he keeps to himself a bit more these days that doesn’t mean he’s a complete hermit.”

“Well I’ll make you a deal,” Brian says. “If we can get John to go along with this, I’ll join you as well. That sound fair?”

“Sounds perfect,” Roger says, grinning widely. With Brian on his side he _knows_ that he can convince John to join in for this one, final adventure.


	3. The Lighthouse

John’s island rises high out of the sea, the lighthouse standing above a sheer cliff face that drops straight down into the ocean below. With the late afternoon sun still shining brightly Roger can’t see the beacon actually blinking but he knows it’s rhythm by heart and he counts it out by force of habit anyway: _six seconds on, six seconds off, six seconds on…_

The island is just barely off the coast, separated from the the mainland by only a scant few hundred meters. It’s close enough that John can easily go ashore for supplies, but far enough out to sea that he’s largely left along unless he seeks out company - which he doesn’t do all that often, these days.

It’s also close enough that they have to be careful of other sailors catching sight of Brian in Roger’s ship. So, in the short amount of time it takes Roger to adjust his sail and start steering towards the small pier at the far end of the island, Brian shifts again. One minute he’s sitting against the mast with his tail wrapped close around him, to keep it out of Roger’s way. Then in the blink of an eye the tail disappears, transformed into a pair of human legs, and Brian is shakily trying to stand to his feet.

This, Roger thinks, is always the most impressive show of Brian’s abilities. The mer prefers his defensive magic, the wards and charms that he sets in place around his corners of the ocean to protect the creatures that share his home, but the transformations are on an entirely different level to that altogether.

This one in particular, Brian’s human form, may be less of a dramatic change than the octopus but Roger knows that this is an infinitely more difficult form for him to hold. Brian hadn’t even attempted it until Freddie introduced him to Roger and John, and they all started going off on treasure hunting adventures together where having a third pair of legs was often more helpful than not. Still it had taken Brian months to learn how to do this and to hold it for more than a few minutes at a time, and then years to be able to hold it more-or-less indefinitely.

But those days seem to be behind him now. Roger catches a bit of a grimace on Brian’s face as he gets his feet underneath him, and Brian clings tightly to the mast to stay upright as his legs shake and his knees threaten to buckle.

“You doing alright over there?” Roger asks as Brian takes a cautious step away from the mast, and almost falls on his face.

“Fine,” Brian lies, and grabs onto the beam for support once more. “Just wore myself thin working with the wards earlier, and I don’t do this as often as I used to.”

That’s true enough. They all went their separate ways after the loss of Freddie, staying in touch but leaving their days of treasure hunting behind them. Without the constant adventuring, Brian now has little reason to go ashore.

There’s also the small matter that Brian was far younger when he used to do this on a regular basis - but Roger needs to stay on Brian’s good side, if he wants his help convincing John to leave to his lighthouse, so he doesn’t bring that up as he guides his ship along the pier and climbs out to secure it.

Roger is pretty sure he could tie cleat hitches in his sleep but his hands aren’t as nimble as they once were and he takes his time with the knots, making sure each one is perfectly secured before moving onto the next. This ship, _The_ _Rhapsody_ , is his home, his life, and his last great connection to Freddie - losing it now, especially due to a few poorly-tied knots, is absolutely unthinkable.

Brian eventually clambers off the ship on unsteady legs to help Roger tie off the final few knots, just as a dog starts barking further up the island. “I think we’ve finally been spotted,” Roger says with a grin.

That grin turns into a loud belly-laugh as Brian perks up, craning his neck to look for John’s dog, Sammy. For someone who isn’t always fond of the human world Brian has a soft-spot for animals of any persuasion, especially the dogs that call the sea and her shores their home.

Roger glances up towards the house as he finishes double-checking the last knot. Sammy is trotting down the winding path, though not quite racing down to greet them like he did when he was a pup. Behind him stands the lighthouse itself, the tower and the attached keeper’s house, with John standing silhouetted in the doorway.

Roger waves, his arm making a wide arc high above his head, and at first he’s not sure if John sees him - but then John waves back, and Roger breathes a small sigh of relief that his friend seems open to having unexpected company today.

The path leading up to the lighthouse is long and winding and _steep_. Roger remembers helping John move into the lighthouse two decades ago and racing each other up the hill, laughing loudly as if they were still young boys and not two grown men who had lost a brother only a few scant years before. Roger would give his left leg for the ability to run up this path again, if that wouldn’t defeat the purpose of such a wish.

Next to him Brian is faring even worse. He was struggling to walk on land to begin with, and the strain of hiking up to the top of the island is taking a lot out of him. Brian grits his teeth and keeps trekking uphill without complaint, but the effort is showing on his face.

“Here, lean on me,” Roger says, looping an arm around Brian’s waist to help support him.

“I would’ve been fine,” Brian mumbles, as he starts to lean on Roger. “But thank you.”

“I’m sure you would have been, but I don’t want to haul you back down to the ship if your legs give out and you revert back to your mer-form,” Roger says and Brian, predictably, doesn’t bother responding to that comment.

Sammy waits for them about quarter of the way from the top, sitting on his haunches and panting loudly. As they approach the old dog he barks at them in greeting, his tail thumping against the ground and stirring up a small cloud of dust in the air. Sammy whines at Brian as he takes a few steps closer, as he always does, still a little unsure of the mer even after all these years. He knows that Brian isn’t quite human and that makes him nervous, but Brian bends down to scratch him behind one ear and it doesn’t take long from there for Sammy to relax and remember that Brian is a friend.

“I see that your guard dog is still terrible at his job,” Roger calls up to John, now that they’re close enough for his voice to carry up to the top of the hill.

“I don’t need him to guard. I need him to keep watch and he does that just fine,” John calls back. “Told me you two were here after all, didn’t he?” John walks down to meet them and Roger pulls him into a tight hug, while Brian is still distracted by Sammy and recovering from the difficult climb up to the top of the island.

The years have not been kind to any of them, but particularly not to John. His face is weathered from the sun and the sea wind, and there’s a stoop to his shoulders that makes him look far older than he actually is. His shorn hair and worn, utilitarian clothes make him appear cold and severe, the exact sort of grizzled lighthouse keeper that children whisper ghost stories about on stormy nights.

But there’s a warmth in John’s eyes and when he smiles they still crinkle at the corners, momentarily giving back the youth that tragedy and trauma stole from him when they lost Freddie.

“You look good,” Roger tells him, clapping him on the back one last time before stepping away. “Been too long, hasn’t it?”

“It has,” John agrees. “Brian, good to see you too - especially since I don’t have to hike down to the water to talk to you this time.”

Brian stops petting Sammy long enough to pull John into a hug of his own. “You’re lucky you got me up here today. I’m not used to being on land anymore, and these legs aren’t holding up as well as they used to.”

“Now you know why I don’t bother leaving the island. That hike is rough on old bones,” John says. “Next time you just go into that octopus form of yours and climb into the pulley crate I use to haul up supplies, we’ll get you up here that way instead.”

Roger throws his head back and laughs at that mental image, and Sammy barks in response as well. “Oh, please do that when I’m around to see it!”

“We can do it today, if you like, since you’re both here at the same time for once.” John glances between the two of them, a shrewd and knowing look on his face, and he asks, “Should I be worried about you two being in cahoots again?”

“We’re not in _cahoots_!” Roger protests, at the same time that Brian says, completely deadpan, “Yes, probably.”

John sighs, though there’s still a faint smile playing around the corner of his mouth. “Well, shall we go inside and talk things over then?”

The cottage attached to the lighthouse tower is small, but over the years John has turned it into a cozy home for himself - albeit one with a scarcity of chairs, a testament to how little company John allows in his personal space these days. Roger has no shame and quickly snags the comfiest chair for himself. Brian gives him a withering look but opts to take a seat on the floor, next to Sammy who curls up in his bed by the fireplace.

“I’d offer you tea, but I’m a bit short on cups,” John apologizes. “Though - Brian, if you want some…”

“Yes, please. If you don’t mind,” Brian says eagerly. He’s been fond of the human drink ever since he was first introduced to it, and Roger has heard more than one complaint over the years about Brian’s many failed attempts to brew it under the sea.

“So, John, how have things been?” Roger asks, as John quickly washes out a cup and puts the kettle on to boil. “Everything still going well for you?”

“It’s been alright,” John says with a small shrug. “I think some of the townsfolk want me to retire. They’ve been sending their kids over to help with chores around the island.” John hmphs, clearly annoyed with the very idea that he would need help with anything. “I may be old but I’m not as decrepit as they seem to think I am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with needing help from time to time,” Brian says, clearly amused by John’s disgruntled response to having his island invaded by children from the mainland. Sammy woofs once and Brian reaches out to scratch him behind his ear. “Your dog even agrees with me.”

“Sammy can’t be trusted, the kids spoil him with treats every time they show up,” John grumbles.

Roger laughs and tries to hide it in a cough when John gives him a withering look. Which is fair enough - Roger knows how grating it is to be offered help with tying up his ship or carrying supplies aboard by younger and over-eager sailors on the docks. There’s something particularly humiliating about having others assume he must be infirm or senile just because of his age, when Roger knows that he’s still sharper and stronger than most of those offering the unwanted aid.

That’s not a problem that Brian faces, but in some ways his situation is worse. There are no others like him in these waters to offer help, even if he wanted or needed it.

“Anyway,” John continues as he pours Brian’s tea and passes it over to him, before sitting down in the only other chair in the room. “The kids aren’t all bad. They just want to hear stories and learn shanties, and one of ‘em is teaching me to knit sweaters for Sammy. It’s their parents that are the real problem, and the officials who keep asking me if I’m sure I want to stay out here.”

“And are you sure?” Roger asks.

“Yes,” John says, without hesitation. “I like my job here, and this is my home. Where else would I even go?”

 _With me_ , Roger wants to say, but he doesn’t. It’s going to be hard enough convincing John to leave his lighthouse for one final quest to look for Rhye. Convincing him to permanently give up the cozy life that he’s built here to join Roger on an ancient ship that has been left unchanged since Freddie’s death would be absolutely impossible.

But that doesn’t stop Roger from _wanting_. He spent two decades living almost side-by-side with Brian, John, and Freddie - and now 25 years yearning to go back to the happy days they had together in their youth. He wants John back in his life for more than just these too-infrequent visits, like he wants Brian back from the depths of the ocean that he now calls home, and he wants Freddie _alive_ again even though that’s impossible.

They’re all impossible dreams anyway, in their own ways.

“Enough of that, though,” John says, drawing Roger back out of his thoughts. “What are you two up to these days? Still tormenting the local fishermen, Brian?”

“ _Tormenting!?_ ” Brian sits up so quickly that it startles Sammy, who whines unhappily at being disturbed. “I’m hardly tormenting them, _they’re_ the ones tormenting all of the poor animals who-”

“I found one of Freddie’s treasure caches,” Roger announces loudly, cutting off Brian’s tirade before he and John can wind each other up too much. Normally Roger finds their bickering rather amusing to watch but he doesn’t have the patience for it today.

Unlike when Roger made the same announcement to Brian, John’s reaction isn’t one of immediate interest but rather wariness. “Did you now?” he asks, his voice guarded and suspicion starting to grow in his eyes. “Do I want to know what you found?”

“He found this,” Brian asks, and he gently tosses John the nautilus shell.

John catches it and, unlike Brian, he spots the scrimshaw right away. “Didn’t think we’d ever see this again,” he says softly. For a moment his expression is open and all Roger can see is the pain he still carries from Freddie’s last few months.

And then John turns the shell over and sees the message scrawled on the inside, and his face closes off again. “Well, that’s new.” He glances up at Roger and gives him an unimpressed look. “I’m assuming that’s why you’re here, then? You think Freddie… what, used his final moments to tell us to keep looking for Rhye?”

Roger knew that convincing John wasn’t going to be easy but the derision in his friend’s voice is unexpected and Roger finds it a struggle to stay calm as he says, “There’s more than that. The shell’s been enchanted. It’s pointing the way to something.”

John looks at Brian for confirmation and the mer nods. “It’s true,” Brian says. “There is a spell on it, but I don’t know know who cast it or what exactly it’s pointing to.”

“Do you think Freddie cast it?” John asks him.

Brian gives Roger an apologetic look but he still tells John, “No. I don’t think that’s likely at all.”

“But you’re still crazy enough to go along with Roger on this.”

“Hey!” Roger protests loudly, but he’s ignored by the other two.

“I told Roger that I’d only go with him if you came as well,” Brian says to John.

John seems genuinely surprised by that and he sits back in his seat, and studies the shell in his hands. “Did you now,” he says, more to himself than to Brian.

He falls quiet, lost in thought, and it takes every ounce of control that Roger has to give him the space he needs to think. Roger holds his breath and grips the arms of his chair so tightly that it makes his hands ache. Across the room Brian has gone still as well, his hand resting on Sammy’s back but no longer even petting him as he also waits to hear John’s decision.

After a small eternity John shakes his head, and Roger feels his stomach drop even before John says, “I’m sorry, Roger, but no. I can’t go with you.”

He holds out the shell to Roger, but Roger doesn’t move to take it back. “What do you mean you can’t come? Why not?” he demands instead.

“Because I can’t upend my entire life to go chasing fairy-stories any more,” John says, a bit tersely. “I have responsibilities here that I can’t abandon for the sake of some quest to follow a magic seashell that supposedly leads to the _mythical_ kingdom of Rhye!” He snorts and shakes his head, and adds, “I mean for god’s sake, do you even realize how crazy that sounds?”

“It’s not any crazier than what we did before!” Roger says. His teeth are gritted and he can feel anger bubbling up in his chest again, but he tries to keep himself calm so he can get through to John. “Besides, Freddie always thought Rhye was real-”

“Yes, well, Freddie was wrong,” John interrupts, and the bluntness of his words is almost enough to knock the wind out of Roger.

John sighs and turns to Brian and says, “Brian, please, help me talk some sense into him. You always said Rhye was just a legend.”

“I always said the stories were inconclusive,” Brian says. It’s clear that he’s hedging his answer to try to stop the argument between Roger and John from getting any worse, and the hand that isn’t buried in Sammy’s fur is anxiously toying with his shell necklace. “Whoever enchanted Freddie’s scrimshaw clearly believed in them, at least.”

“But you don’t even know who that is!” John says, his own frustration slipping through in his voice.

“Does that even matter?” Roger asks. “Finding proof of Rhye was all Freddie cared about, and for all we know he disappeared following this exact lead!”

John snorts derisively. “He was sick, Rog. He didn’t leave for one more treasure hunt, he left so we wouldn’t have to watch him die.” John shakes his head and throws the shell at Roger, who has no choice but to catch it. “I just finished telling you that the townsfolk are looking for any excuse to remove me from this job. I’m not going to jeopardize everything I’ve built for myself here - and my _life_ \- to go chasing something that’s only important to you.”

Roger feels like he’s been punched in the stomach. There’s a beat of silence in the room, broken only by Sammy’s low whining at the obvious tension between his owner and Roger. It lasts just long enough for something to flash across John’s eyes - something that’s not quite regret but might almost be an apology - but Roger doesn’t give him a chance to say anything else.

“I should’ve known that you didn’t ever give a damn about Freddie,” Roger snarls. “You were all too eager to run away once he was gone, it’s obvious that you didn’t care about anyone but yourself.”

The words are chosen to hurt and they hit their mark too well. Brian hisses, “ _Roger!_ ” in a too-late warning as John shuts down, his face going cold and emotionless to mask the pain of the verbal blow that Roger just landed.

John stands slowly, bracing himself against the table. Roger can see his knuckles turn white with how tightly he’s gripping the wood surface but Roger meets his hard gaze with an equal amount of stubbornness, even if there are tears of frustration pricking at the corner of his eyes.

“Get out,” John says in a deadly quiet voice.

And Roger, without saying another word, does.

“John, I-” Roger hears Brian start to say, before he slams the door shut behind him and starts off storming down the path.

He doesn’t get far before tears start blurring his vision and he has to stop. “You stupid fucking idiot,” he growls, and he doesn’t really know if he’s talking about John or himself. He scrubs at his eyes furiously with one hand, trying to wipe away the evidence of his emotional reaction to the argument even though there’s no one else outside on the island to see.

In his other hand he’s still holding onto the nautilus shell with an iron grip and Roger forces himself to relax his hand, his fingers opening one by one to reveal Freddie’s scrimshaw. By chance Roger is already facing enough to the south that the shell is glowing faintly, and it takes only the slightest movement to make it shine bright and brilliant once more.

And it all feels so fucking _pointless_ now, because Roger can’t do this alone. He can’t face a journey like this by himself - but if he’s being truly honest with himself, he’s simply too old to do this alone as well. If he had found the shell ten, fifteen years earlier he wouldn’t hesitate to follow it to the ends of the Earth... but not now. Roger may be reckless but he’s not suicidal, and even he has his limits of what he’s willing to attempt by himself.

“Rog! Roger!”

It’s Brian, and Roger turns to see the mer hurrying down the path towards him. Part of Roger wants to keep trekking back down to his ship, so he can sail off and lick his wounds in private, but a much larger part of Roger doesn’t think he could bear to be alone right now. So he shoves his hands, and Freddie’s shell, into his pockets and waits for Brian to catch up with him.

“Did you leave voluntarily or did John throw you out too?” Roger asks as the two of them walk back down to the sea together. He tries to keep his tone light and casual, but it comes out a little hoarse instead and he knows that he misses his mark by a wide mile.

“Well since I wasn’t the one being an ass, I exchanged friendly goodbyes with John and left of my own volition,” Brian says. His voice is mild but that’s somehow more grating than if he had been outright judgemental, and Roger scowls but doesn’t say anything in response.

The walk back down to the ship, though easier than the initial hike up, still seems to take forever - and yet when they finally reach the dock, Roger finds that he doesn’t quite know what to do next. The sun is just starting to set over the water, casting its long rays over the sea and making Roger’s ship sparkle in the sunlight. All of the carvings that Freddie did over the years are thrown into stark relief in the setting sun, some still bearing faint traces of paint, others embellished with shell inlays that Roger has carefully and tediously repaired over the years.

And flying above it all is _The_ _Rhapsody’s_ flag - _their_ flag, Queen’s flag, because that was the name Freddie had bestowed upon them all those years ago. They didn’t have a captain, they weren’t part of someone else’s crew - they were only themselves, only _Queen_ , sailing under their own crest, the same one that decorates Freddie’s scrimshaw. It was his design, and Brian and John’s handiwork in sewing it, and Roger’s ship that very quickly became _their_ ship above all else.

“You know,” Brian says, a little quietly. “I’m always surprised to see that you’re still sailing on _The_ _Rhapsody._ I don’t know why, because I know you’d never willingly replace this ship. But seeing it like this... so unchanged, even after all these years… It still manages to catch me off-guard, somehow.”

Roger knows what he means because, despite living and sailing on this ship every day of his life, it somehow still manages to catch him off-guard as well. There are moments like this when Roger looks at _The_ _Rhapsody_ and the decades seem to fall away, and he half-expects to see Freddie pop his head up over the railing and demand to know what’s taking them so long to get the ship underway. Roger doesn’t have to say any of that to Brian, though, because he knows the mer feels the same.

He _thought_ John had felt the same as well, but he’s not sure he really knows anything about John anymore.

Instead of thinking about that, or responding to Brian’s soft comment, Roger clears his throat and asks, “So, are you swimming back home or do you want a lift? I mean, I’m assuming you’ll be going back to your cove now that our little-” He cuts off before he can let the word _adventure_ slip out and instead says, “-visit with John is over.”

“What are you going to do now?” Brian asks instead of answering Roger’s question.

Roger shrugs. “Dock my ship on the mainland and get a drink or ten at the pub, I suppose.”

It’s clear that that isn’t the answer Brian was expecting and he cocks his head, studying Roger intently. “You’re not going to…?”

“What, try to follow the shell on my own?” Roger shrugs. “I don’t know. Like you said before, this will probably be dangerous and I’m not actually stupid enough to think I can do this by myself. But I don’t have any other treasure leads either, and after finding this…”

Roger looks out over the ocean. Somewhere out there is whatever the shell is pointing towards - whether that be Rhye or something else altogether. No matter what it is Freddie would be dying to find it, if he was here... but he’s not. And Roger feels himself break apart a little bit more as he realizes that he may never get a chance to follow this new lead.

“This was the last hope I had of finding something _great_ out there,” Roger says, his voice a little softer than it was a moment before. “If I can’t follow this, I think it might be time for me to finally call it quits on the treasure hunting altogether.”

He’s expecting Brian to be shocked, or to protest that Roger doesn’t have to do something so extreme - or maybe to take a page out of John’s book and accuse him of being ridiculous and impulsive.

He’s not expecting Brian to go quiet for several long moments, before finally asking, “This really matters to you, doesn’t it?”

The question catches Roger off-guard. “Of course it matters!” The response is immediate and his frustration and emotion leak through in his words before he can reign them in. “It’s about the only thing left that still matters at all!”

“Why?”

There’s genuine curiosity in Brian’s voice, and Roger is pretty sure that’s the only thing keeping him from punching Brian so hard that he reverts back to his mer-form. He knows that Brian still doesn’t always understand human culture, but he doesn’t understand how Brian could possibly be confused about Roger’s feelings on _this_ , of all things.

“Because we never got closure,” Roger says, and it’s a struggle to find the words to explain this without losing himself in his anger and the grief that never quite managed to fade with time. “Maybe John was right and Freddie left so we wouldn’t have to watch him die, but when he swam away he left us with _nothing_. No answers and no b-”

Roger swallows and it takes an effort to force out the words, “-no body to bury. You have your projects, and John has his dog and his lighthouse, and all I have is the same boat we always sailed in and a handful of Freddie’s trinkets that I dug up and rescued. And that’s it.”

Brian makes a small, distressed noise. “Even without Freddie, you still have John and I-”

“You don’t get it!” Roger snaps, before Brian can finish trying to calm him down with platitudes. “This isn’t about you and John, it’s about _us_. We always used to go off on adventures together, but I’ve spent the last 25 years sailing on my own - and I’ve spent a larger portion of those years than I care to think about looking for signs of Freddie. I need to do this, because it might be the only thing that’ll let me finally say goodbye to him. But I _can’t_ do it on my own. I just can’t.”

“Whatever this spell is pointing towards, it won’t be Freddie,” Brian says gently. “He’s dead, Roger. You have to know that.”

“I do know that!” Roger shouts. “For fuck’s sake, Brian, I’m not an idiot! I know he’s dead, I know if we find anything it’ll only be bones, but I _have_ to look. Not to find him, but because all Freddie wanted in life was to find proof of Rhye. And if he couldn’t do that himself then by god, I’ll do it for him.”

He laughs but it’s humorless and broken, and in his pocket he grips the shell so tightly that it’s a wonder it doesn’t crack underneath his fingers. “Except I can’t, not even if I could stomach sailing out on my own. I need help but without you and John I don’t have anyone, and I don’t have any fucking idea what I’m supposed to do now.”

Brian doesn’t say anything and Roger glances over at him slowly, dreading to see the confusion and pity that he knows will be written all over his friend’s face - but it’s not there. Instead Brian is deep in thought, his brow wrinkled and a small frown on his face as he clearly puzzles through _something_ , though Roger has no idea what.

He doesn’t have long to wonder, however, because it’s only a few moments later that Brian nods once, determinedly, and meets Roger’s eyes again. “Right. I’m going with you.”

“You’re _what_?” Roger didn’t hear that right - or he did, but Brian just means going with Roger to the pub to make sure he’s not going to drink himself to death. He can’t really mean…

“I’ll go on this adventure with you. Follow the shell, see where it leads… Not quite like old times, but maybe it’ll be close enough?” Brian smiles at Roger and it’s a little crooked and a little unsure, but it’s still genuine and sincere nonetheless.

“Why?” Roger asks. “If you’re doing this out of pity, or- or-”

“I’m doing this because it’s important to you, and because you were right,” Brian interrupts before Roger can work himself up more than he already has. “I don’t have your belief that this leads to Rhye, and I don’t know if this will lead us to any clues about where Freddie went to spend his last days. But Freddie _would_ want us to do this and… and I’ve missed this. Sailing with you, I mean. I just hadn’t quite realized how badly until now.”

Roger gapes at him. He doesn’t know whether to yell at Brian or start crying again or demand a better explanation than that, but he doesn’t get a chance to do any of those things before Brian climbs past him and onto the ship.

The mer looks down at Roger, who’s still standing rooted in place on the dock, and anything Roger might have said dies in his throat. It’s not that Brian looks like Freddie - he never did, not with his wild curls and slightly fanged teeth, and certainly not now with his aged face haloed with silver hair - but he grins, brighter and more confident than before, and Roger is transported back to the days when this was a common sight. His friends, standing aboard their ship, smiling and laughing and excited to sail off together into the great unknown.

“Well?” Brian prompts, when Roger just stares at him, stunned and overwhelmed. “Are we going to cast off, or would you rather spend the night on John’s dock?”

That startles a laugh out of Roger and Brian beams at him, clearly pleased to have gotten that reaction. “You could come back down here and help me untie the damn ship, you know!” Roger fires back, the sarcastic retort an automatic response after years of friendly bickering like this.

Brian starts to ramble off some excuse about why he can’t help, and Roger ducks down to start untying the ropes - and also to hide the grin that’s slowly spreading across his face.

Further away, at the top of the island, Sammy barks a few times, the sound echoing out over the expanse of the ocean. Roger pauses, his smile slipping for a moment as his heart seizes with the reminder that they’re still one brother short on this adventure.

But he takes a deep breath, exhales slowly, and calls up to Brian, “Yeah, yeah, just admit that you’re too lazy to actually do any of the work here,” because the response is expected. That gets Brian riled up again and Roger lets himself be swept up in the teasing and good-natured jabs, until he can almost forget his fight with John and almost pretend that he doesn’t feel anything but excitement for the adventure to come.


	4. The Adventure

_“_ I challenge the mighty titan and his troubadours _,” Freddie sings, waving one hand in the air like he’s conducting an invisible orchestra. His tail matches the movements, waving as well and flicking water droplets across half the ship. He just got back aboard after diving into the sea to stay cool and wet, and now he seems content to lounge across the deck while they stay anchored and try to get their bearings._

_It’s been several months since Freddie and Roger first met, and it wasn’t long after that that Roger introduced John to Freddie and the siren introduced Brian to them as well. But this is the first time that the four of them have ventured out together on a treasure hunt._

_For Roger, it’s almost a normal day - just with the addition of three very strong personalities on his ship, which Freddie has recently re-christened as_ The Rhapsody _. For Freddie, it’s all been a grand adventure - albeit one where he’s letting the others do most of the heavy lifting while he lazes about and sings, thankfully without accidentally enchanting the humans aboard the ship now that he’s developing a better grasp on his powers._

_For John and Brian, though, the day has largely just been a giant headache so far._

_“I’m telling you, the map shows an island right there!” John says, his voice tense with frustration._

_“And I’m telling_ you _that there’s no island in that spot!” Brian retorts. His tail slaps against the deck to emphasize his words, or at least what’s left of it does. Brian had attempted to transform his tail into human legs earlier in the day and now he’s stuck with one side of his flipper looking like an elongated human foot with long, webbed toes._

_He doesn’t seem too concerned about it, insisting that it’ll revert back to normal “soon enough”, but Roger had gotten one glance at it earlier and it had nearly turned his stomach._

“And with a smiiiiiile,” _Freddie sings louder to drown out the sound of Brian and John arguing over the map._ “I’ll take you to the seven seas of Rhye!”

_That seems to be the end of the song’s lyrics but Freddie keeps humming snatches of melody. Roger thinks he might recognize a bit of a human song in there, but that’s not what has piqued his interest._

_“What’s Rhye?” he asks Freddie, though he has to raise his voice to be heard over the general commotion occurring around him._

_Freddie stops humming, and sits up so quickly that he almost topples over before he manages to balance himself on his tail properly. “What do you_ mean _what’s Rhye? Everybody knows what Rhye is, darling!”_

_“Not humans,” Brian chimes in from the other side of the deck. “Rhye is mer mythology, Freddie. They wouldn’t have any reason to know about it.”_

_“But still!” Freddie huffs, clearly thrown by the suggestion that not everyone is familiar with the subject of his song._

_“What is it then?” John asks as he sets aside the map for a moment to join the conversation as well. “A person? A place?”_

_“It’s a place, of course!” Freddie says. “It’s the birthplace of all mers, our ancient ancestral home, stretching across the seven seas-”_

_“_ Supposedly _,” Brian interjects. “The kingdom of Rhye, if it ever existed, fell a thousand years ago. If there’s proof it ever existed, well, I’ve never seen it.”_

_“It did exist!” Freddie insists hotly. “My mother had a necklace from Rhye, passed down through generations-”_

_“Just because it’s old, that doesn’t prove it’s from Rhye-”_

_The argument between Brian and Freddie isn’t actually heated, and sounds like something that they’ve already debated half to death, so Roger doesn’t feel guilty about cutting in. “Can one of you two please actually explain what Rhye is, and what happened to it?”_

_“Like Freddie said, according to legend the Kingdom of Rhye was an ancient mer kingdom -_ the _mer kingdom, in fact,” Brian explains. “And at the center was the capital city, the Heart of Rhye. It was a city of knowledge and art, and the magic of the Heart poured out across the entire kingdom to keep everything safe and peaceful. But over time the magic was stretched thin and eventually broke and the kingdom fell, taking most of the mer population with it - or at least that’s the reason given for why there’s so few of us left these days. But it’s probably just a legend.”_

_“There are other stories though. Stories that say that the Heart of Rhye was real, and it’s ruins can still be found,” Freddie adds. “And some stories that say that it’s still there and thriving, closed off from the world but waiting to be found by mers who are brave enough and clever enough to hear its Song.”_

_“And you believe those stories?” John asks, sounding skeptical._

_Freddie shrugs. “Why not? The world is full of strange and mysterious things already. Why can’t this be one of them?” He sighs and flops back down dramatically onto the deck. “Of course,_ somebody _has to be_ boring _and refuse to explore leads with me…”_

 _“I’m not being boring, Freddie, I’m being practical,” Brian says, with the tone of someone who’s had this argument far too many times before. “Even if_ _the stories are true - and I’ll grant you that we can’t prove that they aren’t - the odds of two of us finding evidence of Rhye on our own is-”_

_“What about four of us, then?” Roger asks before Brian can finish his sentence, his mind already racing with ideas._

_Freddie sits back up. “You want to go looking for Rhye?” he asks, cautiously excited._

_“Why not?” Roger says. “If we’re already going to be sailing out together on the hunt for treasure… Well, this isn’t too much different from that, is it?” He looks at Brian and John, trying to gauge their reactions to the idea._

_John shrugs and says, “I suppose if we’re already adventuring together, following leads for Rhye isn’t the stupidest thing we could do.”_

_“It’s certainly smarter than continuing to look for an island that’s not there,” Brian says - and John whirls on him, all talk of Rhye forgotten as the two of them resume pouring over the map and bickering about its contents…_

“You need to adjust the ship slightly to the port.”

Roger grits his teeth and tries to keep his voice level as he says, “You just told me to adjust it starboard not five minutes ago.”

“You must have overcorrected then, because we’re not sailing in line with where the shell is pointing anymore.”

Since setting out from John’s island a day before, their adventure has been smooth sailing only in the literal and physical sense. Roger had been so excited to once again be sailing with one of his dearest friends, that he hadn’t quite been prepared for how much of an adjustment it would be to have someone else aboard _The_ _Rhapsody_ with him again - and how odd it would be to have Brian here, alone, without Freddie acting as a peacekeeper or John to add another voice to the various debates.

“Then please, feel free to get up here and steer the damn ship yourself.” There’s no response from the mer, who had exchanged his legs for his usual tail and taken control of the shell almost immediately after they got underway. Roger snorts and mutters under his breath, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“I can’t hold a human form right now,” Brian says quietly, and Roger immediately feels like an ass. “I tried to switch back a few hours ago and I couldn’t.” He huffs, not really a laugh but not quite a sigh, and adds, “I knew I was out of practice, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“Yes, well…” Roger’s voice trails off as he scrambles to think of something, _anything_ , to say that won’t accidentally make the situation worse. Ever since he found Freddie’s nautilus shell he feels like he’s been constantly putting his foot in his mouth, and the last thing he needs is to piss off Brian badly enough that the mer literally jumps ship.

He adjusts the helm according to Brian’s earlier direction, and then walks back to join him. The mer is sitting in a shallow box that they filled with saltwater not long after setting off, so Brian can keep his tail from drying out without needing to jump overboard every couple of hours. It’s a feature that got added to _The_ _Rhapsody_ when it became clear that Freddie and Brian would be spending more time aboard the ship than not, and one that Roger is glad he didn’t remove even though it hasn’t seen much use in the last two decades.

Roger eases himself down onto the deck next to Brian with a small groan, as his old joints protest the adjustment from standing at the helm for so long to sitting on the hard wood. “What about your octopus form?” he asks casually. “Maybe actually put those creepy tentacles of yours to good use for once.”

Brian gives him a withering look. “You hate my octopus form, and now you want me to go crawling all over the helm of _The_ _Rhapsody_ in it?”

No, not really, but Roger forces himself to shrug and say, “Well, if it would get you to pull your fair share of the weight…”

“I know what you’re trying to do, and you don’t have to do it,” Brian tells him. “I don’t need you cheering me up. Legs have always been my worst transformation, it was stupid to think that I could still manage it when I’m this old and this out of practice.”

There’s a forlorn note in Brian’s voice that Roger hates to hear - both because he hates when Brian gets in one of his low moods like this, and because he knows there’s little he can do to help under the current circumstances.

“Well like you said, giving yourself legs has always been your worst transformation, so maybe you just need a bit more time to get back into the swing of things, yeah?” Roger suggests carefully.

“I suppose.” Brian sounds a little reluctant in his agreement, though some of the tension does bleed out of his frame, and Roger is more than willing to count that as a small victory.

“Do you remember the first time you tried to transform your tail into legs?” Roger asks, as he lets the memories of that day slowly drift over his thoughts. “The four of us were on our first real treasure hunt together, and you and John were bickering over the maps…”

“John and I spent most of our time bickering over the maps on our adventures,” Brian says. “Because you and Freddie were always off in your own world, piecing together clues about Rhye from the most trivial of sources.”

“Or else trying to get you to attempt new things with your magic,” Roger adds. He stretches out his legs, trying to find a slightly more comfortable position to sit in. He regrets not dragging over a crate to sit on instead of dropping straight down onto the deck. “I remember that it took Freddie hours to convince you try for the legs...”

“It took Freddie _years_ , actually,” Brian corrects. “He was always pestering me to try for human legs, but I didn’t have any reason to give it a go until we met you and John.”

He holds the nautilus shell up again, checking that they’re now sailing in the right direction. Luckily they are, because Roger isn’t looking forward to standing up again when he does have to correct their course.

“And then on your first attempt you only managed to get one human foot, and nothing else.” So many years have passed since then that Roger can laugh at the memory now, even if at the time it had been one of the most horrifying sights Roger had ever seen. “And you couldn’t change it back! The rest of us were freaking out and of course you weren’t worried at all-”

“Oh, I was definitely worried,” Brian says with a laugh of his own. “I was downright panicked in fact, but I tried to play it cool to keep you lot from getting more worked up than you already were.”

“Wait. Are you serious?”

“Of course I am. I was terrified every time a transformation went wrong, because I needed to be the one to fix it,” Brian explains. “It’s not like I knew another sea witch, not until we started meeting others on our adventures, and everything I know about my magic I had to learn myself.” Brian laughs and adds, “I mean, imagine if I had to live with a single human foot for weeks or something!”

Roger suddenly feels cold, even though Brian is more relaxed than ever and still chuckling over the story as if he doesn’t realize how _horrifying_ this sounds to his human friend. “Fucking hell, Brian! That’s awful!”

Brian glances over at Roger, his head tilted in slight confusion. “But you knew I was self-taught. Did you… did you never realize…?”

“That every time we egged you into trying a new transformation you could have been stuck like that forever?” Roger cuts in. “Of course I didn’t! God, you probably thought I was such a dick-”

“I didn’t,” Brian tells him. “Roger, I was taking that risk long before I met you. I would have taken that risk even if I _never_ met you and John, because that’s just what us mers have to do. There’s so few of us left that we don’t have the luxury of learning from someone else. We take that risk, or we spend our lives denying who we are. I didn’t want to do that and neither did Freddie. That’s why he sang even when his control was poor, and that’s why he encouraged me to keep doing more with my magic even though anything could have gone wrong."

“I never realized…” Roger shakes his head and wonders how he could have been so blind to the clues for all these years, when now that it’s been spelled out for him it all seems so obvious. “I mean, obviously I knew that there weren’t many mers left. It’s not like we met many of them on our adventures, no matter how far we sailed.”

“We met enough, though,” Brian says. “There was that sea witch who was following the same Rhye lead as us, and the tribe of selkies we met up north.”

“Including the love of Freddie’s life,” Roger adds.

Brian laughs. “Jim! God, I _had_ forgotten about him. It took Freddie all of about three minutes to fall in love with him, I think.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen Freddie so happy as when he was with Jim,” Roger agrees. The two of them had certainly been a sight to see - near inseparable for the scant few weeks that they had spent up in Jim’s area, and then Freddie had pined for _months_ after they finally left. “I’m still surprised that Freddie came back home with us at all, to be honest.”

“If Jim lived any closer to us, I don’t think he would have,” Brian says. “It’s a shame that Jim wasn’t ready to leave with us, though. If Freddie had been able to visit him again I think he could have convinced Jim to come back with him, but obviously…”

Brian’s voice trails off and Roger has to swallow past a sudden lump in his throat, because the only reason Freddie hadn’t made it back to Jim was because he had gotten sick. And then he’d gotten _sicker_ , so quickly that it had made Roger’s head spin. One day they had been planning where to sail to for their next treasure hunt, and then their plans had been shelved and they were instead looking for _anyone_ who might have been able to save Freddie.

That proved to be an impossible task. There were simply too few mers left, and none of those knew enough healing magic to save Freddie. And then Freddie had finally put his tail down and told them that he just wanted to spend his last days - however many were left - in peace, and with them for company.

At least until he apparently changed his mind and decided that he was better off alone, and swam off into the great unknown without a single word of warning - or goodbye.

Roger had spent years being angry about that, because it was easier to be angry than to let himself grieve. He searched for signs of Freddie with a sort of righteous fury to his actions, until the anger warped into something too close to hatred and Roger was forced to reevaluate what he’d let his life become, before his memories of Freddie were tainted forever.

And what he realized, when he finally confronted the emotions that he had spent years trying to sail away from, was that while Brian and John had moved on Roger had gotten himself stuck - stuck on this ship, stuck in his endless search for signs of what happened to Freddie, and stuck with the grief that he never processed and now didn’t know how to let go of.

“Yes, well…” Roger clears his throat and pulls himself up to his feet with a groan. “How’s our course looking? Still all good?”

Brian frowns, but holds up the nautilus shell and carefully rotates it until it starts shining again, bright enough to cut through the darkness of the ocean at dusk that’s now creeping over the ship. “We’re fine for now.” He glances up at Roger, who’s trying to stretch out his aching body without being too obvious about it, and adds, “You should get some sleep. You didn’t last night, and I can watch the ship well enough until morning.”

“Yeah, alright.”

The weather is nice enough that Roger strings up a hammock, rather than going to his quarters below deck. It’s more comfortable than sleeping on a cot almost as old as he is anyway, even if it takes him a bit longer to climb into the hammock these days than it did in his youth.

Around him the ship is quiet - never silent, but the creaking of wood and the wind in the sails are so familiar to Roger’s senses that they hardly register to him at all. What does register are the noises from Brian, made foreign by the years since the mer last spent such an extended amount of time aboard _The_ _Rhapsody._

Roger once knew how to fall asleep with John snoring next to him and Freddie singing quietly in the background and Brian diving into the ocean to chase the phosphorescent glow of a school of fish. Now the gentle sound of Brian’s tail splashing in the basin is enough to keep Roger awake, and a sudden _squelch_ has him almost falling out of the hammock in alarm.

When he cracks open one eye he can see that it’s just Brian, now in his octopus form again, with the nautilus shell held delicately in one tentacle as he scurries across the deck to adjust the ship’s course. Roger squeezes his eyes shut and pulls his blanket a little tighter around him, and pretends that he can’t hear the sucking sound of Brian’s tentacles pulling away from the wood as he moves.

The days from there pass in a similar, and eventually comfortable, routine. Roger mans the helm and Brian mans the shell and they carefully navigate south, zigzagging along the coast for several days as the shell forces them to make continual adjustments to their course, before they finally turn out towards the open ocean. They never quite stop bickering, but it becomes less heated and more teasing as Brian and Roger slip back into the easy patterns they had built in their youth, while neatly sidestepping the gaps caused by the absence of Freddie and John.

Brian eventually manages to transform his tail into human legs again, jumping up with an excited and triumphant cry - only to lose his balance and topple overboard, losing the legs the moment he hits the water and spending the next hour swimming next to the ship, sulking, while Roger laughs and laughs.

Roger, for his part, relearns how to sleep with the background noise of a mer aboard his ship as Brian mans the helm through the long hours of the night, while during the day the two of them pass the time with easy conversation.

Brian is delighted to realize that _all_ of Freddie’s carvings that decorated _The_ _Rhapsody_ are still there - including the ones that contain the lyrics to the songs they wrote together over the years. He bursts out laughing when he finds the carving that accompanies Roger’s song, _I’m In Love With My Ship_ , but his laughter quickly fades when he finds a small etching of a boat surrounded by stars, encircled by Brian’s own lyrics.

“ _For many a lonely day sailed across the milky seas…”_ Brian sings softly, his fingers tracing over the words and Freddie’s carvings. “ _Ne'er looked back, never feared, never cried.”_ He shakes his head slightly and adds, “It didn’t quite work out that way, though, did it?”

“I don’t know. It was accurate enough for the time,” Roger says as he finishes trimming the mainsail to account for the unexpected and sudden strong gusts of wind that they’re beginning to encounter. “We were certainly fearless enough, back then at least. And remember how you ended that song?”

“ _For my life, still ahead, pity me_.” Brian makes a face. “Maybe a bit too on the nose, then. Let’s go back to looking at your old songs. _When I’m holding your wheel, all I feel is your keel_ …”

“I have a better idea,” Roger says, before they can get into another argument over Roger’s lyrics. He still stands by them, of course, but he doesn’t particularly feel like explaining the metaphor for the thousandth time.

Instead he points to an island that just appeared over the horizon and asks, “Do you recognize that?”

Brian pushes himself upright and takes the spyglass that Roger hands to him. “Should I recognize it? It just looks like an ordinary island to me…”

“We dug up Salty Dog Shirley’s treasure chest on that island,” Roger tells him. “Does that jog your memory at all?”

“Roger, we dug up a _lot_ of treasure over the years,” Brian says, shaking his head. “I can’t remember what treasure belonged to which pirate or what was in it when we dug it up.”

“It’s not the treasure that’s important, it’s the island itself. That island marks the furthest south that we ever sailed together.” Roger laughs as Brian quickly raises the spyglass again to take another look at the otherwise unremarkable bit of land. “We’re in truly unchartered waters now, Bri!”

For Roger, treasure hunting has always been a means to make a living first and foremost. It’s only ever been an _adventure_ when he was with his friends and now, for the first time in years, he feels that familiar excitement bubbling up inside him once again. It makes him grin, bright and wide and exhilarated… but when he looks back at Brian again, the mer has a very different expression on his face - something a little bit lost, and a little bit heartbroken.

“Brian?” Roger ventures cautiously. “You alright over there?”

Brian startles slightly, and shakes his head as if he’s trying to physically clear out the thoughts that momentarily distracted him. “Yeah, of course, I’m fine,” he says automatically, and before Roger can call him out on that lie he sighs and adds, “I just didn’t realize we were so far south already, that’s all.”

The mer sets down the spyglass but keeps looking at the island, as if he can somehow find the answers to all of his questions if he just stares at the tiny speck of land for long enough. “I didn’t expect to find any sign of what happened to Freddie, not really. I know what happens to dead things in the ocean and, at least for us mers, there’s a certain amount of peace in knowing that our bodies become just another part of another creature’s life cycle when we’re gone.”

It’s a sense of peace that Roger, rather emphatically, does not share. His mind shies away from the very idea of Freddie like _that_. It’s one of the reasons that he’s clung, desperately and foolishly, to the more comfortable idea that Freddie simply _disappeared_. It’s not a lie, not entirely, but after 25 years Roger is also well aware that it’s no longer the entire truth.

Brian is once again lost in his thoughts and doesn’t seem to pick up on Roger’s discomfort as he keeps talking. “But it’s one thing, you know, to know all of that and something else altogether to see that island and realize that Freddie never could have made it this far south. And even if there was anything left of him to find, we’re not going to find it now.”

There’s a thousand things that Roger could say in response to that, but his mouth runs away with him yet again and he finds himself asking, “Was that the only reason you came along, then? To find some sign of Freddie?”

“I came along because Freddie would have wanted us to do this,” Brian says, finally glancing away from the island and back to Roger. “You were right about that. I told you that on John’s dock, before we left. But if you’re asking if I think we’ll find anything else?” Brian shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think we’re going to find any sign of where Freddie went, not now, but I don’t think we’re going to find what you're looking for either. Like you said - we’re in uncharted waters. I don’t know what to expect anymore.”

“You don’t think we’re going to find proof of Rhye.”

It’s not a question, because Roger already knows Brian’s thoughts on that particular subject, but the mer still shakes his head again and says, “No. I don’t.”

“Why not?” Roger asks. “You can give nice answers like the stories being “inconclusive” all you want, but you _don’t_ believe in Rhye. You’ve never really believed the legends, but in all these years you’ve never explained _why_. Freddie was always so convinced that the kingdom exists, or at least that it used to, and I’ve never understood why you feel differently.”

“Because there’s just no proof of it. It’s really as simple as that,” Brian tells him.

“Just because no one’s found anything yet doesn’t mean-”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Freddie,” Brian cuts in. His tail slaps against the deck of the ship, an animated gesture that Brian always seems to unconsciously do every time he gets worked up about something. “Mers have spent _centuries_ looking for proof, but no one’s found anything yet. Not Freddie, not anyone we met on our adventures… If Rhye was real, someone out there would have _something_ to prove its existence by now - but there’s still nothing. I spent most of my childhood wishing for it to be more than just a myth, but at some point you’ve got to grow up and be practical about things.”

“Fuck being practical,” Roger says. “Honestly, why do you always have to be so damn realistic about things all the time?”

“Well, one of us has to be,” Brian retorts. He nods towards the horizon and adds, “And while _you_ have your head in the clouds, we’ve been sailing dangerously close to that storm.”

True enough, what started out as just strong winds is starting to develop into a proper stormfront that’s blowing _The Rhapsody_ slightly off-course. Roger grabs the helm to take control of the ship again and calls back to Brian, “Yeah, well, if you really want to be helpful, try to manage your human form for a bit and go adjust the jib. It’s just a little storm right now, and we shouldn’t have a problem with it if you give me a hand.”

It takes Brian a couple of seconds to manage the transformation, and longer to get his legs underneath him so he can stagger to the sail in question, but even though it’s been years since he’s had to do this Roger is begrudgingly impressed with how quickly he manages to make the necessary adjustments.

Though, that feeling is quickly replaced with a familiar sense of vague irritation as Brian says, “Honestly, how have you managed to survive sailing solo for so long? Without John and I around to keep you grounded, it’s a miracle you don’t go sailing right off the edge of the world!”

“Honestly it’s a fucking miracle that I let you back on my ship at all,” Roger snaps. “This is why I miss Freddie - he, at least, knew how to have fun with things!”

“Well I’m sorry that I’m not Freddie!” Brian snaps back, and suddenly what had been mostly-friendly bickering becomes something else altogether. “I’m sorry that I’m not _fun_ like he was! I know that I’m too practical and I spend too much time worrying about things, and honestly I wouldn’t blame you if you decided that you didn’t want me on _The_ _Rhapsody_ anymore after all!”

Roger hasn’t heard this much pain in Brian’s voice since the early years after Freddie’s death, when Roger and John had been half-convinced that Brian’s grief would cause him to up and disappear on them as well. If Roger wasn’t needed at the helm to keep the ship from being buffeted by the wind and the waves, he’d cross the deck and sling an arm around Brian’s shoulders in comfort because he hardly knows what else to do in moments like this. But he can’t leave his post with the weather picking up like it is, no matter how much he may want to. He glances back at Brian instead and sees the mer hunched in on himself, his tall form looking so _small_ against the sail and weighed down by grief - a weight that Roger knows the feel of all too well.

“You’re right. You’re not Freddie,” Roger tells him. “But, Brian - _no one_ is like Freddie. There is not a mer or human alive who will ever be like Freddie. And I don’t want you to try to be him, because that’s not why you’re my friend. You drive me insane half the time and I’ve wanted to throw you off my ship more times than I can count, but I like your practicality and I like that you fight with me, and I like having you here on _The Rhapsody_ again.”

The sea is getting choppier and it’s starting to take some serious effort to keep the ship on course. That doesn’t stop Roger from looking back at Brian again and giving him a wide, bright grin. “Besides, you’re crazy enough in your own way. What other mer would spend years trying to give himself legs, just because his friends won’t let him give up?”

That manages to startle a laugh out of Brian, and Roger can see his grip on the sail line relax slightly as Roger’s light joking does its job. “You know, I think that’s what I miss most about Freddie, some days,” Brian says, and he sounds thoughtful, not heartbroken like before.

“What? Egging you on, you mean?” Roger asks, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the wind.

“More like, having someone who encouraged me to be _me_ despite my fears and despite everything that could go wrong,” Brian calls back to him. He finishes trimming the sail and hops up on the quarterdeck to join Roger by the helm. “It’s funny, isn’t it? The different things we miss the most. His bold humor, or his quieter moments of encouragement... “ He shakes his head and muses, “I wonder what John would say he misses the most?”

The words cut Roger deeply as he remembers his parting barb to John. Despite what he said to hurt his friend he knows that John cared about Freddie. John had grown up in a small fishing family in a small fishing town, burdened by responsibility from a young age. Despite Roger’s attempts to get him outside his comfort zone he was never really successful - not until Freddie came into the picture.

Meeting Freddie was the first time that John really understood that there was _more_ to the world than he had ever realized - more wonder, more magic, more _fun_. And Freddie had responded by taking the younger man under his care and teaching him everything he knew, from the tales of Rhye to the best fishing spots and everything in-between.

Having to watch Freddie slowly waste away with sickness was bad enough, but his abrupt disappearance broke something in John. Roger knows that his friend misses Freddie, just as badly as Brian and himself do, but he can’t even begin to guess what John would miss the _most_ , not when the harsh years have turned John into someone that Roger isn’t always sure that he recognizes.

A rogue wave breaks against the side of _The_ _Rhapsody_ , rocking the ship and sending Brian stumbling slightly. “Storm’s really picking up,” Brian says as he steadies himself and Roger brings the ship back under control.

He sounds worried now, and Roger is starting to get concerned about the weather himself, but it’s nothing he hasn’t sailed through a dozen times before. “We’ll be alright,” he says confidently. “It’s just a bit of a squall, and we’ll be through it before you know it.”


	5. The Storm

Roger has spent almost his entire life on the water. He learned the tides in skiffs and dinghies, sailed up and down the coast in small sailboats and large fishing trawlers, dodged pirates and breathed sea spray until all he could taste was salt… The ocean has always been in his blood, and from the moment he bought his own ship he knew there that there was no place else he’d ever want to be. 

He’s sailed in sun, snow, and storms. He’s spent summers drifting with the currents, lazing on the deck and sleeping through the hot afternoon until the cool night air ushers in a clear sky of stars to follow into the horizon. He’s spent winters sailing in the far north, tense days spent with Brian warding the ship against ice and Freddie singing them awake when it was too dangerous to go to sleep. 

And Roger has seen more shipwrecks than he cares to remember. He’s rescued fellow sailors and seen the grisly remains of those who were found too late. He’s picked through washed-up wrecks for treasure and raised a toast in pubs to those who didn’t make it back alive, and counted his blessings that he’s never gone overboard himself. 

Roger knows what bad weather can do to ships. He’s felt the force of the waves crashing over his deck, knows the struggle of holding the helm when nature’s fury is trying to drive him into the rocky coast, and said far too many prayers as he sailed into a storm that he couldn’t avoid but didn’t know how to survive. And after decades spent on the water, Roger has a healthy amount of respect for anything the ocean can throw at him - but he’s also confident in his ability to get himself and his ship through something as simple as an unexpected squall or gale. 

The only problem, is that this storm isn’t a simple gale at all. 

Waves crash against the hull of _The_ _Rhapsody_ , splashing over the railings and rocking the boat dangerously. Rain batters down onto Brian and Roger and soaks them to the bone as the storm grows worse and worse around them. The wind whips against the sails and pulls the line out of Brian’s hands as he tries to adjust them, and Roger has to brace all of his weight against the helm to keep himself upright. 

“Where the hell did this storm come from?” Roger shouts. It had seemed so much milder when Roger first saw it growing on the horizon, and he would have done more to avoid it if he had known that it was going to be this bad. He may be confident in his sailing abilities, but he isn’t _stupid_.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s letting up any time soon!” Brian yells back. 

The mer has been working the sails since the storm really started picking up. It’s a task that he used to handle with John at his side in the past, but with _The Rhapsody_ sailing with a two-person crew Brian is left to manage the sails on his own. Luckily, like playing an instrument, the motions seem to have come back to him easily enough, despite the years since the last time he did this. 

The wind had nearly ripped the storm sails out of Brian’s hands before he could raise them, but even once they’re finally in place they hardly seem to be making a difference. The winds and waves are buffeting the ship so hard that Roger can hardly steer the ship at all, and can’t even think about bringing it into position to heave-to. All he can do is hold onto the helm and strain to keep the ship upright as the waves effortlessly toss them around. 

“It came on quick enough, it might let up quickly too!” Roger says. “Can you transform into something and go take a look at how big the storm is?”

At first Roger thinks that Brian didn’t hear him over the thunder and the wind, but after a few moments Brian shouts back, “It’s taking too much energy to hold this form! If I change now, I don’t think I’ll be able to change back!”

That’s worrying to hear. Roger has seen Brian unexpectedly revert to his mer form on more than one occasion, usually due to either fatigue or shock. It was a problem even in his youth but, given how much harder it is for Brian to hold his human form these days, Roger knows that he may very well be fighting this storm on his own sooner rather than later. 

“Do you still have the shell?” Roger yells over his shoulder to Brian. 

Through the blinding rain he can barely make out Brian’s silhouette as he struggles to tie back one of the sails, but he can perfectly imagine the expression that must be on his face as he shouts an incredulous, “ _What!?”_ back to Roger. 

“Freddie’s shell! Do you still have it?”

Another wave crashes against the ship and sends a sudden rush of water pouring over the deck, causing Brian to almost lose his footing. “I think we have more important things to worry about right now, Rog!” he says as he braces himself against the railing to stay upright. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in a bit of trouble here!”

“And we’re going to be in even more trouble if we get through this and realize we lost the shell!” Roger says. “Do you have it or not?”

“I have it! It’s in my pouch!” Brian tells him. 

In the midst of all the chaos around him, Roger breathes a sigh of relief. He knows that the pouch that Brian wears on his hip is enchanted to stay with him no matter what form he takes. Given their current circumstances, it’s the safest place for Freddie’s scrimshaw to be. “Good! Whatever happens, don’t lose it!”

“I’ll try not to!” Roger laughs despite their perilous situation and glances over his shoulder at Brian, but before he can say anything Brian’s eyes widen in alarm and he shouts, “Roger, look out!”

Roger glances forward again just in time to realize that the ship has shifted direction slightly, just enough that _The_ _Rhapsody_ is now angled parallel to the approaching waves. He shouts in alarm and wrenches the helm around but it’s too late. 

The wave crashes directly against the side of the ship instead of the bow taking the brunt of the impact. The whole ship rocks on its side and the sound of splintering wood momentarily drowns out the storm, making Roger’s heart twist with fear. He risks another glance behind him and can see where a chunk of the railing has been ripped away. Roger watches in disbelieving shock as the piece of wood goes skidding across the deck, the carvings that Freddie did so many years ago lit up by the lightning flashing overhead, until the ship lurches again and Roger has to look away.

It’s only then that he realizes that he didn’t see Brian on the deck behind him. 

“Brian!” he shouts as he fights to bring the ship back around. “Are you okay?”

The only response is a rumble of thunder and the howl of the wind around him, and Roger feels cold in a way that has nothing to do with the storm. 

“Brian! _”_ he yells as loud as he can. “ _Brian!”_

“I’m here! I’m alright!” Brian finally shouts, and Roger’s knees almost buckle with relief. 

When Roger looks behind him again he can see that Brian is in a bad way. There’s a bloody gash across his forehead and he’s shaking badly, though whether from cold or the strain of holding his human form or some injury that Roger can’t see, he has no idea. The mer is clinging to the mast, trying desperately to remain standing, but it’s a battle that he’s quickly losing. 

“You idiot, you call that alright?” Roger hollers at him. He can already feel his throat going hoarse from trying to be heard over the storm. 

Brian, predictably, ignores Roger’s comment and instead says, “I can’t hold this form for much longer! Do you want me to try to ward the ship?”

It’s a question that Roger wasn’t prepared for, and one that he doesn’t have an immediate answer to. Warding the ship will no doubt take the last of Brian’s energy and leave Roger alone to weather the storm by himself - but maybe it will give Roger the edge he needs to get through the storm alive. And maybe it can save _The Rhapsody_ , and every one of Freddie’s mementos stashed aboard, from further damage. 

When put in those terms, the answer seems painfully obvious. “Do it!” he tells Brian. 

A moment later first Brian’s hands, and then _The_ _Rhapsody_ itself, start to glow with the light of Brian’s magic. It’s always an unnerving sight, at least in Roger’s opinion, but he forces himself to keep his attention focused on sailing through the storm, even though he desperately wants to look back at his friend to make sure that he truly is alright. 

Roger sees another wave approaching _The_ _Rhapsody_ and he angles the ship so it breaks across the bow. He only realizes, a moment too late, that another wave is coming up on the starboard side of the ship - straight towards where Brian is standing. 

“Brian!” he shouts, but the warning comes too late. 

Roger turns just in time to see Brian’s eyes widen in horror before the wave breaks directly on him. The crash of the wave is louder than the thunder overhead and Brian’s magic abruptly disappears as he vanishes under the torrent of water. 

_“Brian!”_

Roger watches as the water recedes, taking another a section of railing with it and leaving a section of rigging torn and flapping uselessly in the gale - but there’s no sign of Brian anywhere. Roger is breathing heavily now, fear and worry threatening to overwhelm him as he scans first the ship and then the ocean for any sign of his friend. Surely Brian would have reverted to his mer form… surely he’ll be alright… _god please, let him be alright…_

“ _BRIAN!”_ he screams into the storm, and then again, and _again_ , but unlike before there’s no response at all. 

Roger’s vision is blurred and he doesn’t know if it’s from the spray of the waves or the rain or his own tears, but he grits his teeth and tightens his grip on the helm and tries to bring the ship back under control. But with his rigging damaged and one of his sails now all but useless he’s fighting a losing battle, and he knows it. 

He doesn’t know how much of his enchantment Brian managed to complete, or if he indeed managed to do anything at all before the wave swept him away. He doesn’t know when the storm will lessen or where he’ll end up if he gets through this at all. He doesn’t know where he is, or where Brian is, or what direction he’s sailing… Roger doesn’t know _anything_ and for the first time since he was a very young sailor faced with his first storm, Roger feels a deep sense of terror at his current predicament. 

“God- Freddie- _anyone_ , please let me get through this alive,” he prays as he wrenches at the helm. Now that he’s down a sail the ship is slow to respond and another wave breaks over the deck, filling Roger’s ears with the sound of more splintering wood. 

He doesn’t look at the damage, can’t bear to see another piece of Freddie’s legacy, of _their_ legacy, ripped away from him. Overhead the wind finally tears their colors free and Roger can only watch helplessly as the flag, lovingly designed by Freddie and painstakingly sewn by Brian and John, disappears into the darkness of the storm.

A crack of lightning illuminates the sky, and Roger thinks he sees a flash of red in the waves. “Brian!” he shouts again, but if that was the mer there’s no response and Roger doesn’t see the form again. 

There’s another bolt of lightning but this time it hits the mast and the pole _shatters_ , sending splinters of wood flying across the ship with some of them hitting Roger in the back as he tries to duck to avoid the worst of the debris. He watches in shocked horror as the heavy sail comes crashing down onto the deck, the impact of the rigging causing the boards - already weakened from the battering of the storm - to crack. The ship tilts on its side, and another rogue wave chooses that moment to hit with enough force that it sends Roger stumbling. And before he can catch his balance the impact of another wave brings Roger to his knees, and then another wave crashes over him, and _The_ _Rhapsody_ is dead in the water with no sails and a hull that’s starting to sink as the ship begins to take on water. 

A captain goes down with his ship. Roger has always known this, and he’s know more than one captain who has done just that. Truthfully, though, he never thought it would be something that he would face himself because with his friends at his side he always felt invincible and with their colors flying high _The_ _Rhapsody_ was always unsinkable. 

But now the colors are gone and Roger is alone, and _The_ _Rhapsody_ is slowly sinking beneath the waves. This ship has been Roger’s entire world for decades now, both his home and his livelihood. It’s held every memory of his adventures with his friends in his youth and the contents of every single one of Freddie’s treasure caches that he ever found. But now those treasures are lost, along with the carvings that once decorated this, the finest ship to ever sail these seas. 

Without _The_ _Rhapsody_ and her treasures, Roger has nothing. 

Without _The_ _Rhapsody_ , Roger finds that he isn’t afraid to die.

And he can think of no better end than to accompany his ship to the depths below. 

Roger staggers to his feet, despite the protests of his aching body and the storm still battering down on him, because if he’s going to die here then he’s going to do it full of pride and dignity - but that pride ends up being his undoing. 

The ship, unbalanced by the water flooding into the hull, suddenly lurches to the side and sends Roger flying. He crashes against the railing of the quarterdeck so hard that it knocks the wind out of him, and then another wave hits the ship and sweeps Roger overboard before he can even think to react. 

In good circumstances, when he’s prepared for it, Roger can hold his breath for just over two minutes. But he’s not prepared to be swallowed up by the ocean and Roger’s last breath isn’t enough to fill his lungs before he’s completely submerged in the water. 

With the storm raging overhead and the waves and currents tossing Roger around like a ragdoll, he can’t even begin to tell which way is up. He can’t see anything and he kicks out but he has no way of knowing if he’s swimming towards the surface or further down into the depths. He doesn’t know if he was thrown clear of _The_ _Rhapsody_ or if he’s caught in her pull as she sinks, and he may have wanted to go down with his ship but not like _that_. 

By sheer luck he breaks the surface and draws in a desperate gasp that’s almost as much water as it is air. And then the waves force him back underneath the dark water and no matter how hard Roger kicks out he doesn’t surface again. Roger’s lungs burn with the need to breathe, and then the burning turns into a sharp pain as every desperate flail as he tries to find the surface again just uses up more of his precious oxygen. 

So Roger stops swimming. He stops fighting the inevitable. He had been prepared to die when he was still aboard _The_ _Rhapsody_ and he knows now that it’s only a matter of time. He closes his eyes and lets his limbs go heavy, and braces himself for the reflexive breath that his body will try to draw and the water that will flood his lungs instead of air. 

In the split-second before that happens a mouth slots over Roger’s and when he gasps he breathes in their exhale, buying him a few more moments of life. Roger’s eyes fly open and even through the darkness and his own blurred vision he can just make out the familiar shape of Brian’s white curls dancing in the water in front of him - as if there’s anyone else it could possibly be. 

Brian grabs onto Roger and begins pulling him through the water. Roger tries to help swim along but he’s exhausted from the sinking of _The_ _Rhapsody_ and his very near-drowning, and admittedly Brian does most of the work of getting Roger to the surface again. 

They break through to the rain and the storm and Roger takes in a heaving, gasping breath as Brian struggles to keep Roger’s head above the waves. Roger coughs and gags as his lungs try to draw in as much oxygen as they possibly can. He’s usually a strong swimmer but in this storm, and with his body still thrumming with panic after his near-drowning, Roger is doing more flailing than anything else and he almost goes underneath again. 

Somehow Brian keeps them both afloat as the mer continues pulling Roger through the water. There’s debris from _The_ _Rhapsody_ floating around them, more than Roger was expecting to see. It seems like his ship did not sink with grace but was instead dashed apart by the waves as she went under. Neither of them, then, got the ending that Roger had anticipated - the difference being that he, somehow, is still alive and his entire world lies in pieces around him. 

Brian is pulling Roger towards one of these pieces of debris, a large section of the bulwark that’s mostly intact and floating on its side. “Come on, get on it!” Brian says, nudging Roger forward until the debris hits his chest. 

“What?” Roger’s thoughts are as sluggish as his movements and he doesn’t understand what Brian wants him to do. 

“Climb up on the piece of wood! You can use it as a raft, and I’ll enchant it to stop it from sinking.”

 _Like you tried to enchant my ship_? Roger thinks, but for once he holds his tongue and doesn’t say the words aloud. Despite Brian’s rescue and the clear attempt to keep him alive, Roger is well aware that his chances of survival are not good. He doesn’t want his last words to Brian to be bitter and hurtful, like his last words to John had been. 

So instead Roger just nods and grabs onto the piece of wood, and tries to haul himself out of the water - a feat that is by far easier said than done. The storm is still raging, tossing both Roger and the flotsam every which way, and Roger is too exhausted to fight against the ocean’s power. Try as he might, he can’t climb aboard the raft. 

Brian ducks out of sight for a moment, and resurfaces on the other side of the wood. He grabs onto the edge to try to brace it for Roger, and he calls out, “Try again!”

Roger does, and this time he gets partially on top of the piece of wood. It’s just enough for his fingers to cling to the same edge that Brian is holding onto, before his strength gives out again. He doesn’t have the energy to pull the rest of his body up and out of the water. All he can do is lie there, panting heavily and acutely feeling every year of his no-longer-young age, and try not to lose what little progress he’s made. 

Across from him Brian grits his teeth and Roger watches as, slowly, he starts to transform. His arms morph into tentacles, with more sprouting from along his sides. Unlike the transformations that Roger is used to seeing, though, Brian doesn’t change into an octopus entirely and even the limited changes seem to take forever for Brian to manage. It seems like Roger isn’t the only one of them who’s exhausted to the bone. 

Two of Brian’s new tentacles stay where his hands had been, holding the raft in place. The rest reach out for Roger, wrapping around his arms and torso and dragging him further out of the water. On any other occasion Roger would be very loudly voicing his displeasure about having Brian’s tentacles touching him, but right now he can barely muster up a grimace at the feeling of suckers clinging to his skin. 

Eventually Roger is fully aboard the makeshift raft and he lies there, boneless and feeling more than half-dead, as Brian’s tentacles let go of him and disappear. Once he has hands again Brian starts casting the enchantment he mentioned earlier and the raft glows golden underneath Roger. Brian’s face is set in a grimace and Roger may not know much about magic, but he’s pretty sure that it’s not supposed to hurt the mer the way it seems to be doing now. 

By the time the light and his magic fade away Brian is breathing heavily, and he wipes away a trickle of blood from the gash on his forehead with a shaking hand. The shell on his necklace is cracked in half and there’s a bruise already forming around Brian’s shoulder, both probably from being tossed about on _The Rhapsody_. 

To say that he looks worse for the wear would be an understatement but, still, the first thing he asks Roger is, “Are you alright?”

Roger lets out a humorless bark of laughter. “That’s up for debate.” And, because it needs to be said before it’s too late, he adds, “Thanks for the rescue.”

“Yes, well, try not to drown again,” Brian tells him. “The raft is enchanted so it won’t capsize in the storm and it should keep sharks away, but my magic doesn’t work on humans. You’re only safe as long as you stay out of the water.”

“I’m not going to be safe out of the water for very long.” A crack of lightning flashes overhead, as if emphasizing the truth of Roger’s words.

“Don’t say that!” Brian says. “I’m going to go get help, and-”

“From where?” Roger cuts in. “The last island we passed was uninhabited, and we’re days out from the closest town.”

“I’ll find someone! There has to be another ship out here!”

“Brian, please. I need you to be your usual rational self here,” Roger says. “Even if you did find someone, by the time you got back to me I’ll still be-”

“No! Shut up, just- just shut up!” Brian snaps. “You are not dying today, do you understand me? Stay here, stay safe, and keep yourself alive until I get back!”

With that Brian disappears beneath the waves before Roger can try to make him see sense - or even say a proper goodbye. Brian’s tail flips out of the water once, and then Roger loses all sight of his friend.

 _Keep yourself alive._ The words ring with a familiarity that Roger can’t place right away and it takes several long minutes before snatches of a song come back to him. It was one of _their_ songs, the first that Brian had written specifically for Freddie when the siren wanted new things to sing.

“Do you think you’re better every day?” Roger mumbles to himself as he clings tighter to his makeshift raft. 

The only response is the howl of the wind and the thrashing of the waves, but Roger hears Brian’s lyrics echo down through the years. _No, I just think I’m two steps nearer to my grave_. 


	6. The Rescue

The storm eventually passes, as all storms must finally do.

Roger, with nothing else to do, simply lies on the raft and drifts in the currents. The storm washed away most of the debris from _The_ _Rhapsody_ and there’s nothing around him but the expanse of the ocean. With no land in sight, and nothing to use as an oar anyway, he doesn’t see the point in wasting what little time he has left trying to go anywhere.

Because Roger is under no illusions that he’ll make it out of his current situation alive. Under the best of conditions a human can survive three days without water, but after battling the storm and surviving his near-drowning Roger knows that he isn’t going into this under the best of conditions.

It’s strange, to be facing down his death like this. Roger had been fully prepared to go down with his ship when he was in the middle of the storm. He’s less eager to face a slow, drawn-out death by dehydration especially when he knows how much it will hurt Brian to return and realize that he was too late.

Roger doesn’t want to think about his friends but with little else to distract himself his thoughts keep circling back to them anyway. He thinks about how Brian will react when he returns and realizes that Roger is already dead, and the guilt that he knows will overwhelm his friend even though none of this is his fault. He thinks about Brian returning home to tell John what happened, and how his last words to his oldest friend were angry and hurtful. He won’t be able to say a proper goodbye to either Brian or John and he knows how much that will hurt them both, because he knows how much it hurt when Freddie did that to them all those years ago.

The sun beats down on him, hot and unrelenting, its rays only blocked out by the shadow of a gull flying high overhead. It’s cries echo out across the ocean and Roger sluggishly rolls onto his stomach so he doesn’t have to see it. His beard, encrusted with dried saltwater, crackles as he rubs his cheek against the rough wood.

“Piss off,” he mumbles at the bird as he tries to get as comfortable as he can. His throat is hoarse and scratchy with thirst, and he hates that he’s surrounded by so much water and yet has nothing to drink. “I’m not dead yet.”

From this position Roger can more clearly see Freddie’s carvings on the piece of wood - carvings that once decorated the entirety of _The_ _Rhapsody_ , and are now lost at the bottom of the ocean along with every precious treasure that Roger had kept over the long years to honor his friend’s memory. Even the few decorations that survived on this piece of flotsam were damaged by the storm, with shell inlays missing and gouges in the wood taking out entire sections of Freddie’s work.

_Goodbye everybody, I’ve got to go, got-_

Roger traces his fingers over the remains of the lyrics to Freddie’s magnus opus. It was a song that Freddie designed to be sung with magic - not to enchant the audience but to enhance their singing so the sound of a dozen voices echoed across the water as they sailed, instead of only three (or four, if John was in the right mood to join in).

_-don’t want to die, I sometimes wish I’d never been-_

Roger can fill in the blanks to the missing lyrics, if he wanted, but these particular ones hit a bit too close to home for him right now. He moves his head so he’s looking in the opposite direction instead. The same expanse of ocean greets him beyond the edges of his raft, but at least the carvings by his face are less painful to consider.

_-have sailed the seas, from Mars to Mercury, I have-_

“Drunk the wine,” Roger mumbles. God, he’d kill for a drink right now.

The burning heat of the day slowly gives way to the chill of night. Roger lies on his back and looks up at the stars, and tries to ignore the headache pounding between his eyes. He sleeps fitfully, dreams of drowning and Freddie’s songs calling to him from the deep, and wakes up feeling somehow more tired and disoriented than he had been the night before.

Roger’s entire body aches, both from the beating of the storm and the cramps that are setting in as his dehydration worsens. He keeps his eyes closed so he can pretend that he isn’t actually as dizzy as he feels, and he listens to the waves murmuring around him and the gulls that keep circling closer and closer overhead and the barking of a dog-

... _barking?_

At first Roger thinks that he must be hearing things, finally driven mad as his death approaches, but the noise continues and eventually Roger can make out a voice as well - a voice calling for _him_.

“Roger! _Roger!_ ”

It sounds like Brian and, on the off-chance that Roger isn’t imagining things, he forces his eyes open. His vision swims and it takes him several long moments before things come into focus, but when they do he can just make out the sight of a red tail flipping out of the water for a brief moment - before Brian surfaces at the edge of Roger’s raft.

“Roger? Rog, are you alright?” Brian asks, his worry evident in his voice. “I brought help, like I said I would!”

“How-?” Roger barely manages to croak out the single word before he starts coughing. His throat is so dry that it feels like sandpaper is scraping over his vocal chords.

“Hey, hey, don’t try to talk,” Brian tells him. He reaches out and gently touches Roger’s forehead, and he frowns in concern. “Your skin is cold. You’re too dehydrated.”

“No shit…” Roger rasps. Brian laughs and between that familiar sound and the cool fingers still touching his skin, Roger is starting to think that this might not be a hallucination at all. “You’re real…?”

Brian grins down at him and says, “I’m real, I promise. But I have to leave you for a moment so I can guide the ship here, alright? I’ll be back soon and then we’ll get you aboard and get you fixed up. Just hold on for a few more minutes, Rog, okay?”

Roger can’t tell if Brian is making any sense, or if he’s just too tired to fully follow what his friend is saying. But he understands enough to know that help is somehow, miraculously, on its way, and so Roger nods once and croaks, “‘kay.”

“Okay,” Brian echoes. He touches Roger’s cheek, just for a moment, and then in the blink of an eye he disappears underneath the water again - as if he was never there at all.

Roger shakes his head. No. Brian wasn’t a hallucination. The mer was real and so was that conversation, which means that help _is_ coming. And as Roger keeps trying to focus his eyes, despite his dizziness and fatigue, he eventually makes out the familiar outline of sails on the horizon - his promised salvation.

Everything goes a bit hazy from there. Roger must be drifting in and out of consciousness because one moment the ship seems to be a league away, then the next it’s hove-to next to him and Brian is once again next to Roger’s raft, frantically trying to get Roger to focus on him.

“John! Lower a rope down, I’ll tie it around him!”

Roger hears the words but he doesn’t really understand what’s happening. Brian swims in and out of focus in front of him, and Roger tries to tell him that he’s alright but he’s not sure if the mer hears him. If he does, he doesn’t respond. Brian is focused on something just outside of Roger’s field of vision, something that ends up being the aforementioned rope which Brian loops around Roger in a makeshift harness.

“Don’t need… help…” Roger mumbles, trying to bat Brian’s hands away. He’s been working on ships for his entire life, and he’ll be damned if he lets someone haul him aboard like a piece of cargo now.

“Yes you do,” Brian tells him, as he ignores Roger’s feeble struggles and ties the last knot in place. “Go ahead!” he calls up to the ship. “Pull him up!”

And Roger, slowly, starts to lift off the raft. The ropes dig uncomfortably into his chest and he clings onto them, at least pretending that he’s doing something to help the situation, while Brian watches worriedly from below.

“You’re not as light as you once were, you know!” a voice calls down from the ship. There’s a familiarity to it but not one that Roger can place, not until he clears the railing and finds himself face-to-face with John.

His eyes must be playing tricks on him again. “John… what…?” Roger asks with a slurred voice as he’s carefully lowered onto the deck. He tries to sit up but his head swims and black spots dance in his vision, and John pushes him back down.

“Take it easy, Rog, you’ve had a rough go of it,” John says. Behind him there’s a low, nervous whining and Sammy presses close to John’s side. Suddenly, the barking that Roger heard earlier makes a little more sense.

John holds a cup of water up to Roger’s mouth, and doesn’t let go even though Roger makes a feeble grab to hold it himself. “Small sips, you don’t want to drink too much at once.”

No, Roger is pretty sure that’s exactly what he wants to do right now. The cool water feels like heaven on his parched throat and he grumbles a wordless complaint when John pulls the cup away, and tries to follow it even though his body doesn’t want to cooperate with him.

“Give it a minute, then you can have some more,” John says. There’s the sound of water dripping and then a cool, wet cloth is draped over Roger’s forehead. “Here. This should help a little in the meantime.”

It does, and Roger sighs in relief and lets his eyes fall shut again. He hears the creak of the deck as John stands up, and snatches of conversation as John talks with Brian who’s still in the water below.

“...coming aboard?”

“No, I don’t think I can…”

“...pull you up…”

“Worry about Roger first, then…”

Roger drifts in and out of sleep. John wakes him up to move him into a shaded area of the ship, then several times after that to give him more water or some light broth. John doesn’t say much during those interactions and Roger doesn’t have the strength to ask all of the questions that he knows he’d be thinking of, if he was capable of thinking of anything coherent at the moment at all.

Roger doesn’t know what time he was rescued, but when he finally awakes with some degree of clarity he finds that night has set. It’s dark aboard John’s ship, the blackness only broken by a golden light shining out from the direction of the helm. Roger sits up slowly and, when he’s sure that he’s not about to be struck down by another wave of dizziness, he carefully gets to his feet.

A low woof from Roger’s side draws his attention. Sammy had clearly been keeping watch over him while he slept, and now he’s alerted his owner that Roger is awake again. John is sitting on the steps to the quarterdeck with a lantern at his feet and he looks up at the noise, and watches as Roger pats Sammy briefly before crossing the deck over to him.

“You should still be resting,” John says mildly. He had been knitting by the light of his lantern but now his work is held loosely in his hands as he watches Roger with a critical eye.

“I feel better enough now, thanks to you,” Roger tells him as he leans against the railing.

John hums slightly and says, “Alright then,” and that appears to be that.

When Roger was adrift on his raft his thoughts were racing with a thousand things that he wanted to say to John - but, truthfully, he never thought he’d get a chance to say any of them. And now that he’s standing here in front of his friend he finds that those thoughts have all left him, and he doesn’t have a single idea of what to say.

John’s face is guarded and his eyes are wary, and Roger can only imagine how angry he must be right now. Between Roger’s parting blow back at the lighthouse and the fact that John was clearly dragged from his home to come save his ass, Roger feels lower than dirt and doesn’t know how to begin to make amends.

“I’m sorry,” Roger says, because if he has to start somewhere he might as well start there. “I’m sorry for what I said at the lighthouse. I didn’t really mean it, I know you cared about Freddie just as much as the rest of us - but I knew saying that would hurt you, and I was an asshole for doing that. And I’m sorry that I dragged Brian into this mess when I knew that it was going to be dangerous, and I’m sorry that I lost _The_ _Rhapsody_ , and I’m sorry that you had to come out here to rescue me when I know you just wanted to stay home. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, but I am sorry. For everything.”

By the time Roger is done talking he can’t even look John in the eye. He’s done enough stupid, impulsive things in his life to be familiar with regret, but he’s never felt as remorseful as he does right now.

“Thank you for that apology,” John says at last. “The first part of it, at least. Not to bruise your ego but you couldn’t force Brian or I to do anything we didn’t want to do ourselves, and I hardly think it’s your fault that a once-in-a-lifetime storm cropped up when you least expected it.”

“But you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me!” Roger says. “You didn’t want to leave your lighthouse but I had to go and nearly drown, and-”

“Roger,” John interrupts, and it’s not as harsh as Roger was expecting it to be. “You didn’t force me to come after you. I was already out here before Brian came to me looking for help.”

That gets Roger looking at John in utter confusement. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it for a moment. How do you think I got to you so quickly, if you were sailing for days and it took me less than one to reach you?” John points out.

“I didn’t think about that,” Roger admits. He’d been so busy wallowing in his own misery that the thought of how John had gotten to him so quickly hadn’t even occurred to him at all.

John chuckles and finally sets aside his long-since-abandoned knitting project, as he relaxes against the steps. “When you left my lighthouse,” John begins slowly, “I didn’t know if I more angry or more hurt, but I knew that I didn’t want to be seeing you again any time soon.”

The words sting to hear but John doesn’t sound bitter and it’s nowhere near as bad as what Roger said to him before, so Roger stays quiet and listens to what he has to say.

“And then I started thinking about it a little bit more,” John continues. “And I realized that you might have had a point. Freddie would have wanted us to follow this lead. Not just because he was obsessed with Rhye, but because he would have wanted us to keep going on adventures together. He wouldn’t have wanted us to drift apart like we did... like _I_ did.”

Sammy wanders over to join them and sits down by Roger’s feet, not John’s, and leans heavily against his legs. Roger reaches down to scratch Sammy behind one ear, and he tries to pretend that the lump in his throat is just because he’s thirsty again and not that he’s emotional about the conversation with John or the easy affection from his dog.

“After Freddie died I just wanted to be alone,” John is saying, and Roger forces himself to pay attention to the words. “It hurt to stay in the places where Freddie used to be, and it hurt to be with you and Brian without Freddie there too. I thought that if I was alone it wouldn’t hurt so much and I could protect myself from ever feeling like that again. And maybe it worked a little bit, but not entirely. Because that hurt has never really gone away, at least not for me.”

“It’s never really gone away for me either,” Roger says quietly, because John seems to be done talking for the moment and the silence makes him feel acutely uncomfortable right now.

“I’m not sure that something like that ever does,” John says. “I’m just sorry that it’s taken me 25 years to realize that and finally get my head out of the sand.”

Roger shakes his head and his fingers dig a little harder into Sammy’s fur. The usually easy-going dog whines, and Roger gives him a gentler pat in apology as he says to John, “Please don’t apologize. You don’t have anything to be sorry for here.”

“I think I do, because when I wanted to be alone I left _you_ alone too. And that wasn’t fair on you,” John says.

His words are a balm that Roger didn’t know that his heart needed, until now. After 25 years of living and sailing with everything Freddie left behind, finally hearing someone acknowledge what a burden that had been is almost more than Roger can handle under the current circumstances.

So he side-steps John’s comment and instead asks, “So, where are we sailing to now, then?”

John frowns at the conversational change, but seems willing enough to let it slide - at least for the moment. “Technically we’re not sailing anywhere right now. We’re still hove-to. Brian needed the time to rest, and I’ll need your help to haul him aboard in the morning - if you’re up for that.”

“Yeah, of course.” Roger can agree to that without hesitation, but he does pause for a moment before asking, “And then once Brian’s aboard? What’s the plan then?”

“Like I said before, I was already following you before Brian found me,” John says. “So I had assumed that we’d be going wherever the shell leads us.”

“If Brian still has it, you mean.”

“Oh, he has it,” John says easily. “Well. He _had_ it.” He reaches down and pulls something out from the tangle of his knitting, and Roger recognizes the nautilus shell immediately. That must have been the golden light that Roger had seen earlier, not the dim lantern at John’s feet. “He gave it to me so I could plan out our next move.”

“And what have you planned out, then?” Roger asks, the question broken by a wide yawn.

John sets the shell aside again. “I’ll tell you in the morning. You should get some more sleep. You were half-dead less than a day ago, you know.”

Roger can’t really argue with that, and he still feels just fragile enough that he finds that he doesn’t want to put up even a token protest. “Alright. But you get some sleep too, okay?”

“Okay,” John agrees easily enough. “And… Roger?”

Roger, who had already started to walk back to his makeshift bed, pauses and looks back at John. “Yeah?”

“I forgive you,” John tells him with a faint smile. “And I’m very much looking forward to sailing with you again.”

Roger smiles back at him. He has no idea what he’s done to deserve John as a friend, but he’s so grateful to still have him in his life. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to this too.”

Roger wakes late the following morning to the sound of faint humming and, more distantly, a familiar splashing in the water by the boat. He stretches out and sits up slowly, and is relieved to find that his body only aches with the familiar twinges that come with his age.

The humming is coming from John, who’s busy knotting several long pieces of rope together in what looks to be some sort of sling. Roger, remembering what John said the night before, can only assume that that’s their plan to haul Brian aboard the ship.

“ _As I walked out one morning fair, heave away, haul away,_ ” John sings under his breath as he works. “ _'twas there I met a mermaid rare, we’re bound for-_ ”

“Sea shanties, John?” Roger calls out, interrupting the song. “Really?”

“What’s wrong with a good shanty?” John asks mildly, and he keeps singing. _“We’re bound for the Heart of Rhye._ ”

Roger snorts. “That’s terrible.”

“You hate shanties. Your opinion doesn’t count,” John tells him.

“It’s still terrible.” Roger stands with a groan, ruffles Sammy’s fur as the dog settles into Roger’s vacated bedroll, and crosses the deck to join John. “Have you told Brian that we’re hauling him up in a net? Because the last time I offered to help him aboard, he told me he’d only allow it if he was half-dead already.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately he’s not too far off from that,” John says, a little grimly.

Roger, suddenly alarmed, looks over the side of the ship. Brian waves to him and forces a smile. The cut on his forehead is no longer bleeding and the swelling in his shoulder has gone down, but it’s clear that he’s exhausted. Roger remembers how Brian had struggled to manage a partial octopus transformation in the midst of the storm, and he had then swum for god knows how long until he found John. It’s no wonder that he needs a little help getting aboard for once.

Still, Brian seems to be in good spirits, all things considered, and he calls up to Roger, “Sorry about this, Rog! I know with the tail I’ll be a bit heavy to haul up-”

“Don’t worry about it, John and I can manage you alright!” Roger cuts in. The familiar guilt is starting to bubble up in his chest, because Brian wouldn’t be in such bad shape if he hadn’t had to save Roger… but guilt won’t get the mer aboard, so Roger does his best to push the feeling back down as he turns back to John and asks, “How’s it coming along?”

“Finished,” John says, as he tosses one end of the ropes to Roger. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.” Roger adjusts his grip on the net and gives John a sideways look. “You aren’t going to sing that ridiculous shanty, are you?”

“You worry less about my singing, and more about your hauling,” John tells him. “Now, lower it down gently… _gently_ , Roger…”

“I am being gentle,” Roger grumbles as they lower the sling down into the water.

It takes some effort on Brian’s part to settle into it, but eventually he motions for John and Roger to start hauling him up.

After knowing each other for so many years, Roger and John are automatically in-sync with their movements but John still starts to sing the shanty again to set a rhythm. _“Haul away you rolling kings-”_

“Shouldn’t that be Queens?” Roger quips.

John’s movements falters at the interruption and below them Brian gives a shout as he’s jostled in the sling. John glares at Roger and says, “If you aren’t singing, you don’t get to weigh in on the lyrics.”

“Sorry,” Roger says, flashing John a wide grin. “Go on, go on, I’ll behave, I promise.”

John gives Roger a suspicious look, but he turns back around and starts singing again. _“Haul away you rolling-”_

“ _Queens_ ,” Roger sings loudly, and this time John doesn’t break his stride and the two of them continue in unison, “ _T’ me heave away, haul away, haul away you’ll hear me sing, we’re bound for the Heart of Rhye…”_

Hauling Brian up is fairly easy, despite the extra weight from his tail, but it takes a little bit more effort to get Brian lowered to the deck and untangled from the sling. “Welcome aboard _The Funk_ , Bri,” Roger says with a bit of a mischievous grin on his face.

Next to him John sighs and says, “My ship is called _The Miracle_ , and you both know that. I even cleaned it up when I took it out of storage so you have no excuse to keep calling it anything else _._ ”

“It is less mildewy than usual, I’ll give you that,” Brian says. His voice is mild but there’s a playful smirk on his face as he teases John.

Roger takes a few exaggerated sniffs. “Still smells a bit funky to me, though.” The ship actually smells fine but he’s missed poking fun at John like this, especially with Brian here to join in as well.

“I regret rescuing either of you,” John grumbles. “Just because it’s not _The Rhapsody_ , doesn’t mean-”

At the mention of his former ship Roger’s heart seizes in his chest, and he quickly crosses back over to the railing to peer down into the water. “The raft I was on… Can we bring it aboard?” he asks, as he scans the ocean for any sign of that final surviving piece of _The Rhapsody_. “I know you don’t have a lot of room on your ship, John, but I think can we make it fit…”

He doesn’t see the look that Brian and John exchange, but when Brian speaks there’s no mistaking the careful and too-gentle tone of his voice. “It’s not there anymore. It sank when I removed my spell. I’m sorry, Rog, but it’s- it’s gone.”

Roger shakes his head. “No. No, there has to be _something_ left...” Some scrap of flotsam with a fragment of Freddie’s carvings, some piece of treasure that they can rescue from the depths… He refuses to accept that it’s _all_ gone.

“I’m sorry, Roger,” John says, as he steps forward and rests a comforting hand on Roger’s shoulder. “The storm was too severe, and the water is too deep to try to retrieve anything.”

“Everything I had from Freddie was on that ship,” Roger says and his voice breaks on the last word.

John presses closer to Roger, his warmth and solid presence keeping Roger grounded even though it feels like his world is falling apart all over again. “Everything important about Freddie is still with you here,” John says, as his hand slides down to rest over Roger’s heart. “And he wouldn’t want you to worry about what he would call “silly trinkets” anyway.”

Roger lets himself lean against John a little, allowing himself the luxury of taking physical comfort from his friend for the first time in a very long while. “But I still want it all back,” he admits, and the words come out barely louder than a whisper.

“I know,” John says, soft and sincere. “I have some of his things back at the lighthouse, and you’re welcome to have some of them when we get back. I know it’s not the same, but…”

“But it’s something.” Roger turns so he’s facing John properly and smiles at him, and it’s not as forced as he thought it would be. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

John smiles at him, just wide enough that the gap in his teeth is visible. “I’m sure Brian would give you some things from his own collection as well,” he says, and he twists around to call over his shoulder, “Isn’t that right, Bri?”

“Actually, I think I have something a bit better.” The mer is digging through the pouch at his waist, and after a moment he triumphantly pulls out a piece of cloth. “Ah, here it is! I found it in the water after… well, you know.”

Roger knows what he’s holding even before Brian shakes out the piece of fabric to reveal a familiar crest - one with two sailors, two sirens, and an octopus atop an ornate “Q”.

“You found it,” Roger breathes. He steps out of John’s embrace to take the flag out of Brian’s hands. It’s a bit more tattered than it was before but, miraculously, it’s still largely intact.

It’s the last surviving artifact from _The Rhapsody_ and, arguably, the most important part of the entire ship. It’s _them_ in physical form, their history and their heart, and Roger is glad beyond words that _this_ is what Brian managed to rescue.

“Rog,” John calls out, and when Roger glances over at him he’s holding out a halyard. “Hoist the colors?”

Roger laughs, and it’s watery and disbelieving and _joyous_ above all else, and he takes the rope from John and carefully attaches their flag. He raises the line with pride, with John and Brian smiling at his side, and although their colors may not be flying over _The Rhapsody_ anymore Roger feels like he’s finally come back home.


	7. The Song

“Did you two notice anything odd about the nautilus shell when you were navigating with it?” John asks as they get _The Miracle_ underway. Roger has been put in charge of the sails while John mans the helm, and although it still stings a little that this isn’t _his_ ship Roger carries out his new job without complaint.

“Odd how?” Brian asks. They’ve draped wet cloths over his tail, to try to prolong the time Brian can spend out of water, and every time he slaps his tail against the deck the cloths make a squelching sound at the movement, startling Sammy who is trying to sleep in the sun nearby. “It carries a spell that I still don’t understand that’s leading us either to a mythical lost kingdom or somewhere entirely unknown. Isn’t that odd enough already?”

“It’s where it’s leading us that’s odd, that’s for sure,” John says. “Last night when we weren’t moving, the shell kept pointing in slightly different directions.”

Roger frowns and ties off the line to the mainsail. “Do you think there’s something wrong with the spell?”

“No. I think whatever it’s leading us towards is a moving target,” John says.

That’s not an encouraging idea, and it puts a damper on Roger’s belief that the shell is really leading them to some clue about Rhye. How could an ancient city, even one that fell into ruin, be moving?

“Brian, what are the odds that it’s just the spell acting up?” Roger asks. Behind him he hears John sigh, and he can perfectly picture how his friend must be rolling his eyes at the question.

“I have no idea,” Brian says. “I don’t know how many times I have to explain this to you, but I don’t know how this spell functions. I couldn’t even begin to guess what about it is a flaw or what’s an intentional feature.”

“Well, we’re still going to follow it, aren’t we?” Roger asks, a little worried despite himself. This changes things and maybe it’s enough for John to change his mind…

“We’ve come this far already. It would be stupid to turn around now,” John says, and Roger breathes a small sigh of relief. “I just wanted you two to know that we might be changing course more often than you’d expect.”

“Oh,” Brian says, with a note of realization in his voice. “That would explain… Rog, do you remember when you had to correct your course every time I checked our direction against the shell when we first set out?”

“Bit hard to forget that, considering that I was about to throw you overboard at the time,” Roger says. “You think that was the same thing? The shell leading us towards a moving target?”

Brian shrugs, and his tail flips up to mirror the movement. “Maybe? It would make sense, you have to admit that.”

“Doesn’t make sense if the spell is supposed to be leading the way to Rhye,” Roger says, with a bit of a grumble. He doesn’t want to start a fight about this, not really, not when he’s finally back with Brian and John and on their first - and probably last - adventure since Freddie’s disappearance. But it’s hard not to be frustrated when they haven’t found any sign of what happened to Freddie, and now it seems like whatever they’re in search of might not be Rhye after all.

“If Freddie was here, he’d have an explanation. Some piece of obscure trivia to explain why we’re sailing towards a moving target,” John says. He lifts up the nautilus shell and starts rotating it to check his direction. When he gets it lined up it flashes with the now-familiar golden light, bright enough to be seen even on a sunny morning like this. In fact it seems to be shining brighter now, as if the spell is growing stronger the closer they sail to wherever it’s leading them.

“He’d tell us that the spell was actually pointing towards some gatekeeper who would show us the way to the Heart of Rhye, or something like that anyway,” Brian says with a small laugh. “Or maybe that it’s pointing to the ruler of Rhye themselves! Do you remember that song that he used to sing? The one about the dethroned King of Rhye?”

“ _Messenger from seven seas has flown, to tell the King of Rhye he’s lost his throne_ ,” Roger sings. It had been the first song he had ever heard Freddie sing, the one that had enchanted him in place on that pier what feels like a lifetime ago now. Roger has never forgotten the words, nor the ethereal sound of Freddie’s voice drifting out of the darkness.

“That’s the one,” Brian says with a nod. “If Freddie was here, he’d be singing that.”

“Not that one, he wouldn’t. Too dreary for an adventure like this,” John counters.

“He _would_ be singing, though,” Roger says. “Maybe something like…” But rather than launching into a song, Roger lets his voice trail off and the ship falls silent around the three of them for a moment.

“Well? Are you going to serenade us with your voice or not?” John asks, a little teasing.

Roger laughs and gives a half-hearted shrug. “I hardly have Freddie’s voice.”

“No one has Freddie’s voice,” Brian tells him. “But I could do with some song. The ship seems too quiet without it.”

That’s certainly true enough. Roger had forced himself to grow accustomed to it in the years since they lost Freddie, but the music made by the wind blowing through the sails and the waves lapping at the hull still seems hollow without Freddie’s voice singing out overtop of it all.

“Well, alright then,” Roger relents. He takes a seat on the deck next to Brian, leaning against his tail and not even caring that the back of his shirt grows damp from the wet cloths draped over him. “Just so long as you two join in at the right points, alright?”

“Oh, going with an audience participation one, are we?”

John gives the wheel a hard turn to adjust their course and the answering groan from the ship is a testament to how long this particular vessel has spent in storage. But thankfully she’s behaving more like _The Miracle_ that she is and less like _The Funk_ that Roger always accused her of being, and if she can get them to Rhye - or whatever their destination actually is - that will be more than enough for him.

“Well, Freddie would want us to join in if he was singing, wouldn’t he?” Roger clears his throat, and takes a moment to make sure he remembers the lyrics, and begins to sing, “ _It’s so easy, but I can’t do it. So risky, but I gotta chance it…_ ”

It’s been awhile since Roger has sung for anyone but himself, but his voice is still strong and clear and when the chorus arrives Brian and John don’t hesitate to join in on the “ _Woah, woah, la la la, woah_.” Together their voices still become something so much greater than the sum of its individual parts - but there’s no denying that the magic is missing, without Freddie’s voice joining with theirs.

“ _Believe me, life goes on and on and on_ ,” Roger sings, a little louder than before, as if sheer volume can make up for the gap in their harmonies. “ _Forgive me when I ask you where do I belong…_ ”

It’s almost familiar, almost exactly what Roger has been missing, almost, almost, _almost_ … but for Roger, who’s been living with almost’s for so long now, it might finally once again be _almost_ perfect.

Night follows day - or so Brian’s old song would say - and as the days pass their course becomes more and more erratic. John hands the nautilus back off to Roger to provide almost minute-by-minute updates for the periods where the shell seems to be sending them every which way, and then abruptly it will stop and they’ll sail in the same direction for hours on end without a single change.

They pass along a long chain of islands, some lush and green with lagoons visible just beyond the reef, and others jagged spikes of rock rising into sheer cliffs out of the sea. Without knowing what sandbars or shoals may be lying hidden beneath the water John gives the coasts a comfortably wide berth. It’s the smartest thing to do, at least until Roger checks their direction against the shell and finds that it’s now pointing straight at the islands.

“Hey, hey, John, wait a second,” Roger says, already moving to adjust the sails to slow down their speed. “The shell’s pointing starboard, right at the islands now.”

“ _At_ the islands?” John gives the land masses a critical look. The one next to them is little more than barren rock, home to nothing visible but the gulls nesting high on the cliffs overhead. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe there’s something in the water by one of them?” Roger suggests, but he isn’t really convinced that that’s the case. The ocean underneath them is unusually clear and they haven’t seen any signs of mers while they’ve been sailing, let alone evidence of an entire city or kingdom.

“Or maybe it’s pointing to something on the other side of the islands now,” John says.

“Can you sail between them, you think?”

John studies the narrow gap between the two closest islands, but shakes his head. “I’d rather not risk it. We’ll have to go around.”

That could take days, given how far this archipelago seems to stretch into the distance, but Roger bites back his complaint. He’s already lost one ship to this adventure. He’s not keen to lose a second.

As if reinforcing that thought, the winds suddenly change and the ship starts drifting away from the islands. Roger hurries to trim the sail again and he scans the horizon nervously for any sign of another approaching storm, but luckily everything around them is clear and sunny. Still Roger’s nerves can’t seem to settle and he’s not the only one who’s now worried, because Sammy whines uneasily and races over to press close against John’s side.

“Hey boy, it’s okay, it’s just a bit of wind,” John says as he reaches down to scratch behind Sammy’s ear to try to calm him down. It doesn’t seem to work, at least not in Roger’s opinion, but he keeps that thought to himself.

“And what if we spend all that time sailing around the islands only to find that the shell is still pointing at them?” Roger asks instead.

John sighs, and Sammy whines again in response. “Then we’ll come up with another plan, I suppose.”

“Alright,” Roger is forced to relent because, really, what else can they do here? “So we’re in agreement, then? We keep sailing south until we can find a way to get to the other side of the islands.”

John nods, and Roger looks to Brian for his response - realizing only as he does so that the mer has been unusually silent during the conversation. “Brian?” he calls out. “That sound good to you too?”

“Hm?” It takes Brian a small eternity to draw his gaze away from the ocean to look back at Roger. “Oh. Yes, that sounds- that sounds fine to me.”

There’s something distant in Brian’s eyes and when the wind blows again his silver curls dance around his face and, for a moment, he looks otherworldly and almost dangerous.

Roger shivers, and it has nothing to do with the breeze.

“Everything alright, Bri?” he asks, cautious. Next to him John’s hand has tightened in Sammy’s fur and the dog presses closer to his owner’s legs, almost trying to hide behind him.

Brian laughs, and just like that the strange atmosphere passes. “Yeah, sorry. Just got distracted for a moment there.” He brushes his hair out of his face and his fingers get momentarily tangled in his curls. He sighs in annoyance and, as he carefully works his hand free, he adds, “If the shell keeps pointing towards the islands I can always swim in closer to the shore to check things out.”

“We’ll see what happens when we reach the other side of them,” John says, and his voice has taken on a note of careful neutrality. “Have you recovered enough to transform again yet? I’d rather not haul you aboard again, if you do have to swim over.”

“I think so. At least, I’m ready to give it a try.” Brian catches Roger’s eyes and there’s nothing strange in his gaze now, but part of Roger still instinctively wants to look away. “Mind helping me free my tail from all the cloths?”

Roger agrees because he has no reason not to, even if some part of his hindbrain is telling him that something is _wrong_ in ways that his conscious mind can’t quite pinpoint.

He’s apparently not alone in feeling that way, because as Roger walks by John the other man mutters, just loud enough for Roger to hear, “Something’s not right with him.”

They keep sailing south, and Roger finds himself watching Brian. He watches as he tries, unsuccessfully, to give himself human legs again, and he watches as Brian manages most, but not all, of an octopus transformation. He watches as Brian re-soaks the cloths and helps him to drape them over his tail again, and he watches as Brian laughs with him and John, and sings with them, and calls out in response to the gulls circling high overhead.

In so many ways Brian seems fine, and if Roger was watching less closely he might be inclined to dismiss the moment of oddness earlier together. Maybe Brian _was_ just distracted, and maybe the wind was just blowing in the wrong direction, and maybe Roger was just a bit too stressed as Freddie’s nautilus shell had started to inexplicably lead them in circles and he was now reading into things that weren’t there at all.

“ _Did we leave our way behind us? Such a long, long way behind us,_ ” Brian sings under the late afternoon sun. John hums along from the helm and Roger pretends to conduct the song from the other end of the ship, and everything _seems_ normal... but it’s not.

It’s not, because Roger has seen the way that Sammy is skittish around Brian, more than he’s ever been before. He’s seen the way that Brian goes quiet and stares out at the ocean around them for long moments on end when the wind blows in a certain way. He’s seen the way that Brian’s magic seems to shine brighter than usual when he attempts a transformation, and the way that it lingers in his eyes and gives them an unnatural glow even when he’s no longer using his magic at all.

Something is going on with Brian but Roger has no idea what. All he knows is that, the further along the archipelago they sail, the more he wishes that they were back north and safe at home, adventure and Rhye be damned.

But still they keep sailing on into the unknown, working their way along the coasts of the islands. Occasionally John will brave the shallower waters and venture closer to see if it’s safe to pass between the individual islands, but he never makes a serious attempt to sail through.

“How long do these islands go on for?” Roger grumbles, as he checks the shell to confirm that, yes, it’s still pointing towards the spots of land along their side. “There has to be a way through that doesn’t require going all the way around the entire chain, or at the rate we’re going we’ll spend the rest our lives trying to get to the other side of these.”

“I’m not risking the ship trying to maneuver between the islands,” John says firmly. “The archipelago has to end eventually, and then we’ll just sail back up the other side of them.”

Roger stares out at the gap between the islands. It looks fine, from this distance, but he shares John’s apprehension about actually sailing the ship through there. Ever since the storm and the loss of _The Rhapsody_ he’s found that he’s more cautious than he ever was before, and he’s not sure that it’s a change that he appreciates. “There has to be _something_ we can do, though...”

“I can check it out from the water, and see if we can get the ship through,” Brian volunteers. Sammy barks once and Brian, laughing, reaches out to ruffle his fur, though Sammy trots out of his reach and sits down close to John’s side again. “See? I think Sammy agrees that it’s a good idea.”

“I think Sammy’s telling you that that’s a _bad_ idea,” John says as he reaches down to scratch his dog behind one ear. “You’re still not back to full strength, Bri. We can keep sailing around for now.”

“No,” Brian says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

It’s the first time that Brian has voiced a strong opinion on their course in several days, since that moment of oddness that Roger still can’t explain, and it’s almost a relief to hear that stubborn note in his voice again.

Roger finds himself relaxing, just fractionally, and there’s a smile playing at the corner of his mouth as he asks, “And why not?”

Brian looks away from them and out at the shallow seas encircling the islands. “Because we’re almost there.”

Any sense of relief that Roger felt disappears immediately. There’s a thousand questions that Roger wants to ask, and the look he shares with John is full of concern for their friend, but neither of them dare to break the silence that has fallen over the ship. Despite the strange atmosphere settling over them all like a heavy fog, there’s a familiar set to Brian’s shoulders that would usually mean that he’s gearing himself up to keep talking - and Roger, desperate to believe that everything is alright with his friend despite the evidence to the contrary, gives him the space he needs to gather his thoughts.

And Brian does eventually keep speaking, but what he says completely catches Roger off-guard. “There’s magic in the sea spray.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Magic,” Brian repeats. He’s still staring out over the water with wide, distant eyes. “I noticed it when we first reached the islands. Sammy’s noticed it too - I think that’s why he’s been so nervous lately.”

Sammy has been nervous because of _Brian_ and the odd behavior he’s been showing, but there are more important things to focus on at the moment than correcting the mer on that point. “But you didn’t think this was something we should know about?” Roger says. “Why wouldn’t you tell us about this?”

Brian’s gaze slowly slides back over to them, like it takes him physical effort to look away from the ocean. “Because I was trying to figure out what it is first.”

“And did you do that?” John asks.

“No,” Brian says, shaking his head. “It’s not a spell, or at least nothing like what I do. It’s an innate part of these waters, something inseparable from the sea itself.”

Roger has never fully understood Brian’s magic but he feels even more confused than usual now. “You said we were almost there. Do you think this magic comes from Rhye then?” Roger asks.

“If you’re asking if this is what the shell is pointing towards, then I don’t know. But whatever this magic is… It feels ancient,” Brian says, and something in how he says those last three words sends chills down Roger’s spine. “I need to get into the water to figure out more, and if I can find a path between the islands at the same time…”

“No. Brian, absolutely not.” John says without hesitation. “You just finished telling us that these waters are infused with some ancient magic and now you want to go swimming in them? Are you mad?”

“No, I’m not,” Brian says, a bit snappish, and something dangerous flickers behind his eyes. “But I _am_ going into the water, whether you like it or not.”

Brian has always been stubborn to a fault and that isn’t phrased as a question - so John turns to Roger for backup. “Rog, help me talk some sense into him. You have to know how crazy this plan is!”

“It’s crazy alright… but I think Brian is right,” Roger says, and even he almost can’t believe that he’s siding with Brian on this.

John throws his hands up in the air. “You have got to be kidding me!” Next to him Sammy whines at his owner’s raised voice, but for once John’s attention isn’t focused on his dog at all.

“I’m not saying that I like this plan, but if there’s weird magic at play here then I think we should try to find out what it is now,” Roger says. “For all we know this could be a sign that we’re getting close to Rhye!”

“ _Or_ it could be something else entirely, and Brian isn’t exactly in top form at the moment!” John argues. “If something happens to him we wouldn’t be able to help. Hell, we might not even _know_ if something goes wrong!”

John’s fear is obvious even through his frustration and it’s one that Roger doesn’t know how to respond to because, deep down, it’s one that he shares. The only difference is that Roger has been forced to confront that fear over and over throughout the years, every time he went looking for Brian and couldn’t immediately find him and every time something went wrong aboard _The Rhapsody_ and he wondered if he would make it home at all.

But he doesn’t quite know how to help his friend confront that fear now, when John has spent the last 25 years hidden safely away in his lighthouse and pretending that it wasn’t there at all.

“John,” Brian calls out, softer than before, and redirects John’s focus back to him. It’s only when John locks eyes with him that Brian smiles and says, “I _will_ come back.”

“You said it yourself, you don’t even know what this magic is,” John bites out. “How the hell can you promise that you’ll come back?”

“Because you need me here,” Brian says simply. There’s still a hint of that strangeness about him, an air to his movements that’s just the slightest bit _off_ , but his sincerity rings out strong and true nonetheless. “I’ll go in the water and stay by the ship until I know what’s going on with the magic, and I’ll only go explore the passage between the islands if it’s safe to do so.”

John’s teeth are clenched so tightly together that Roger can hear them grinding. “Aren’t you supposed to be the reasonable one in the group?” he finally asks, and if it’s supposed to be a joke it falls horribly flat.

“I am being reasonable, and I think you know that,” Brian tells him. “You may not like it, but this is the best thing to do right now.”

“I _don’t_ like this, no, but I seem to be the minority here.” John sighs and shakes his head. “Fine. Do it. God knows getting you to change your mind once it’s made up is next to impossible without Freddie around to make you see reason.”

“If Freddie could feel this magic, I think he would agree with my plan,” Brian says as he starts peeling the wet cloths away from his tail. “Rog, can you give me a hand…?”

Roger gladly hurries over, because it gives him an excuse to have a few final words with his friend without worrying John more than he already is.

“I know I’m technically on your side with this, but _please_ be careful out there,” Roger says quietly as he bundles up the cloths and sets them aside. “Because I don’t know if you’ve realized or not, but the magic has already been doing weird things to you for the last few days.”

“I have realized that yeah,” Brian says, as he pulls himself up to sit on bulwark. “Which is why I need to do this. I need to make sure that this isn’t going to get any worse, before we go any further.”

Roger doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that Brian has been aware of the strange way that he’s been acting over the last few days. It’s not uncommon for the mer to occasionally keep to himself or bottle his feelings up, but he usually doesn’t do it when it comes to things as important or dangerous as this.

“Yeah, well, just take care of yourself.” Roger helps hoist up Brian’s long tail with a small grunt. “If you don’t come back, I’ll find you and kill you myself, alright?”

“Well we definitely don’t want that,” Brian says with a laugh.

The grin on his face is slightly wild, but Roger lets himself pretend that it’s the familiar exuberance that he’s used to seeing from his friend when he lets himself get swept away in an adventure and not anything more unusual than that.

And then Brian gives a small wave and tips over backward, diving off the ship and into the ocean. His tail follows him down in a graceful red arc but it’s barely disappeared beneath the surface of the water before Brian is shooting back up, gasping and flailing and his eyes wide open with shock - and the barest hint of his magic glowing golden around his irises.

“Brian!” Roger shouts in alarm, as John rushes over to join him at the railing. Sammy, startled by the commotion both on the ship and in the water below, darts back and forth across the deck, barking loudly.

“Are you alright?” John calls down to Brian. He’s gripping the railing so tightly that his knuckles shine bright white in the sun, and he’s trembling enough that Roger can feel his shoulder shake against his.

“It’s not a spell,” Brian says, but he doesn’t seem to be talking to them. Roger isn’t even sure if the mer sees them, or has even registered that they’re still there at all. His voice has a note of wonder and the magic in his eyes grows brighter with every passing second, and Roger feels _terrified_.

“I understand now.” Brian laughs and it echoes out across the water in an unnatural way, like the enchantment Freddie would cast over their singing to amplify their voices into a dozen different harmonies. “It’s a _Song_! He was right all along!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Roger asks.

“Get out of the water, now!” John adds - but it’s too late. Brian dives beneath the surface and despite the clarity of the water he disappears, and Roger loses sight of him.

“ _Brian!”_ Roger yells again as he scans the water for any sign of their friend, but there’s nothing there. If Roger was on _The Rhapsody_ he would start throwing rocks into the sea to try to attract Brian’s attention but he’s not on his ship, and he looks around desperately for anything else he can chuck overboard instead.

His search is interrupted by John shoving him, hard enough that Roger stumbles back a few steps. “I told you this was a bad idea!” John shouts. “I told you! I told you, and now Brian’s gone off the deep end and disappeared and-”

“And getting mad at me won’t bring him back!” Roger yells back at him. He grabs John’s hands before his friend can shove him again, and pins his arms against his side to hold him place. “I know you’re scared but fuck, John, so am I right now! Let’s just figure out how to find him and then you can throw me overboard after, alright?”

John pushes away from Roger with less force than before. He’s still shaking and his fear is obvious in his every move, and for a moment he looks frail and _old_ in a way that Roger isn’t used to seeing from him, despite the obvious tells of his age. “We can’t lose him, Rog. I can’t lose him, I can’t-”

“We aren’t going to lose him, do you hear me? Not today, not-” Roger bites back the _ever_ , because they’re both all too aware of how easy it is to lose someone they love and that’s a lie that John doesn’t need right now. “Not now. We’ll find him and get him out of the water and we’ll all be okay.”

“And how, exactly, are you even planning on finding him?” John asks.

“I’m right here.”

Roger and John both race to the bow of the ship and peer down into the water, and it takes every ounce of willpower that Roger has not to recoil at the sight of Brian.

Brian’s magic has taken over his entire body. His eyes shine out bright gold, the warm hazel of his irises now completely obscured, and every inch of his skin is glowing with the same light. Even his wet hair seems to shimmer where it clings to his skin, the golden light reflecting across the white curls and looking like a halo encircling Brian’s head.

Never, in the 45 years that Roger has known the mer, has he ever seen him looking like _this_.

“Brian, I think you should get out of the water,” John says, with the faintest waver in his voice.

Brian cocks his head at them and, a moment later, his tail shifts into a mass of writhing tentacles - more than there usually are by a wide margin, as if even in this his magic is working to an excess. They reach up to grasp the ship and Brian starts to slowly pull himself out of the water. The wood groans in protest but Brian doesn’t stop until he’s eye-level with them. He doesn’t come aboard but instead remains perched there on the bow, a monstrous living figurehead, almost completely unrecognizable as their friend.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Brian says. There’s no echo to his voice anymore but there’s still a quiet sort of wrongness to it that Roger shivers to hear. “We’re almost there, but we need to turn around.”

That’s the second time that Brian has said that they’re “almost there” and Roger still doesn’t understand what he means by it. “Brian, please. You’re not yourself and you’re not making any sense,” he says. “Just come aboard and we can get out of here and-”

“We’re almost at the Heart,” Brian interrupts. “We’ve almost reached Rhye.”

Roger inhales sharply. Brian’s announcement shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s nothing else that could cause this sort of magical reaction, nothing else that would be as ancient and unknowable as Brian had described this as being… but after spending so long looking for the lost kingdom, it somehow feels impossible to actually be standing at the precipice of finding it.

“What do you mean? Are you saying that Rhye is… it’s _real?_ ” John asks. “And that it’s still out there?”

“It’s real,” Brian says. “It’s like Freddie said in his stories. The Heart is singing to bring her people home. But I don’t…”

For the first time he falters. A slight frown crosses his face and he tilts his head, as if thinking about his words - or listening to something that neither Roger or John can hear. It’s a gesture that’s so familiar that, for a moment, he looks like himself again despite the magic enveloping his entire frame.

“The Heart is singing,” he says again. “But her Song is ancient, and I don’t know if Rhye still stands.”

“But you want us to follow it now to find the Heart of Rhye?” John asks.

“Of course,” Brian says. “Isn’t that why we’ve sailed this far?”

John gives Roger a slightly disbelieving look and says, “Rog, can I talk to you for a moment?”

He doesn’t wait for Roger to respond, just grabs his arm and drags him back to the stern, where Sammy is cowering in fear of Brian and his magic. “What the hell are we supposed to do here?” he hisses in a low voice. “We can’t follow Brian’s lead, not when he’s like this!”

Roger looks back at Brian. He’s still perched unmoving on the bow of the ship, still radiating magic out from every pore - but the more Roger looks at him, the more he looks like _Brian_ again. He knows those unruly silver curls, those writhing red tentacles, the crows feet at the corners of his eyes and the still-broken shell necklace draped around his neck… and Roger finds himself asking simply, “Why not?”

John gapes at him. “You cannot be serious! We need to get Brian _away_ from here, not bring him even closer to whatever’s causing him to be like this!”

“John, I don’t think we’re going to get Brian to do anything except follow whatever Song he’s hearing,” Roger tells him. “Besides… he does have a point. We came out here to find Rhye. Maybe this isn’t the sort of proof we were expecting, but we can’t give up now.”

“I didn’t think we’d find _any_ proof!” John tells him. “I didn’t come out here expecting to find anything, I just wanted one last adventure with my friends! And all I’ve gotten is you almost drowning and Brian going completely mad!”

“Well what else do you want to do here?” Roger asks. “Do you want to try to subdue him? Because in case you’re forgetting his other specialty is defensive magic, and I for one don’t want to know what it feels like when he turns that on us!”

“There has to be another option-”

“What? Tell me, John, what else do you want to do?” Roger asks. “I’m scared too you know, but for once I’m trying to be practical here. What do we do if we refuse to follow Brian and he swims off again? What do we do if getting him away from here isn’t enough to break this spell’s hold on him? Hell, what do we do if he turns against us? Can you fight him? Because I’m not sure that I can.”

It’s not a thought that Roger even wants to consider. Both Roger and John grew up with stories of evil mers, violent and wily creatures who would lure sailors away to kill them and drag their bodies to the deep. Roger never truly believed the stories, especially not after meeting Freddie and Brian, but the memory of those ghastly tales is enough to give him pause now. Because if Brian does turn against them when he’s in this state, Roger is under no delusion that they’ll get away unscathed.

John doesn’t answer Roger immediately. He looks back at Brian, who is still unmoving and unchanged on the bow of the ship. Roger doesn’t know what John thinks of the sight Brian makes, but after a moment he sighs and says, “Fine. We’ll follow his lead for now, at least until we come up with a better plan.”

Roger nods once, and calls back to Brian, “Alright, Bri. Lead the way to Rhye.”

They sail back north, through the afternoon and into the night. Brian stays on the bow of the ship, a beacon shining through the darkness, with a few of his tentacles dragging down into the water below. Roger doesn’t know if Brian can hear the Song out of the water, or if now he’s heard it he can sense it’s call through magic alone, but his directions never waver.

“I don’t like that he’s not moving at all,” John says to Roger in a low murmur, in the early hours of the morning. “It’s too eerie. It’s not right.”

It isn’t, but somehow he doesn’t share John’s wariness. The worry for Brian is still there, of course, but if there’s one thing that Roger is good at it’s holding onto hope - the hope that he’d fine proof of Rhye, the hope that he’d find some sign of where Freddie went when he disappeared, and now the hope that once they reach the Heart it will release it’s hold on Brian with no damage done, and they can go home to live out the rest of their lives in peace.

They sail on, through a second day, and then a third. Brian never once moves from the bow of the ship and he doesn’t seem to sleep at all, though he does eat when Roger passes him food. Occasionally Roger will check their course against the shell. It’s light, once as bright as a star, now seems dull in comparison to Brian’s outpouring of magic, but it still points towards the islands - and the further back north they sail, the more Brian’s directions align with where the shell wants to guide them.

Everything is starting to fall together but Roger doesn’t know if he should be more excited, or more worried, about that fact.

“Stop,” Brian calls out, late in the afternoon on the third day. Roger hurries to adjust the sail as John turns the ship’s wheel, and they drift slowly to a halt alongside a sheer, craggy cliff of one of the islands. “Bring the ship about to the portside.”

Roger and John exchange a look, and it’s Roger who points out, “Brian, there’s an island directly to our port.”

“It’s not an island.” Brian’s eyes are locked onto the cliff next to them as he speaks. “It’s a doorway.”

“Doesn’t look like a doorway,” John mutters. The wind is picking up again, and Roger has to pull hard on the sail line to keep the ship from drifting closer to the rocks.

“What are you waiting for?” Brian calls out. His tentacles are starting to lash around him in agitation. “Sail towards the cliff!”

"This is crazy!" John says. "I'm not crashing my ship directly into the side of a cliff!"

"You have to!" Brian shouts. "Do it! Now!"

"John…" Roger says, but he doesn't know what to say to his friend. This is madness, pure and simple, but this is also John's ship and he's the one who has to decide what to do here. The search for Rhye, however it ends, is out of Roger’s hands now.

John ignores Brian calling out to him again and instead locks eyes with Roger. “What would you do?” he asks. “If this were _The Rhapsody_ … what would you do?”

Roger doesn’t want to think about his lost ship, let alone contemplate a question like that. “I don’t know,” he says but the lie is weak and John sees right through it.

“You do,” he snaps, and as the wind continues to build he yanks on the wheel to try to keep the ship in position. “Tell me. What would you do, if we were on your ship now instead of mine?”

The ship is rocked by the wind, their colors snapping in the breeze at the top of the mast, and Roger swallows down his fear as he scans the horizon for sign of an approaching storm. There’s nothing there, though, because this isn’t a force of nature - it’s magical. Even though Roger is human he can feel the truth of that deep in his old bones.

“Roger,” John says, catching his attention again. “ _Tell me_.”

“I trust Brian with my life, but I loved _The Rhapsody_ more than I love myself. And I wouldn’t have risked her for any treasure in the world - not even the Heart of Rhye,” Roger tells him, even though it hurts to admit that aloud.

John nods. “That’s what I thought,” he says, and Roger’s heart sinks into the pit of his stomach. They’re _so close_ to finding everything that Roger has been searching for his entire life - everything that _Freddie_ spent his life searching for - and it’s going to slip from their grasp. And there’s not a single part of Roger that can blame John for that.

“John!” Brian shouts. “Turn the ship! Sail into the cliff! Do it, now!”

Roger braces himself for John’s response because he knows that it won’t be well-received by Brian. There’s no weapons aboard John’s ship, and Roger couldn’t bring himself to use one against his friend anyway, but maybe he can grab some rope and subdue Brian that way…

And then John turns the wheel sharply, and the ship starts moving towards the cliff.

Brian gives a triumphant laugh from the bow of the ship, as Roger stares at John in shock. “You were right! I trust Brian with my life too! And I’m trusting him with all of ours today!” John calls out to him. “Now trim the sails! Quick!”

Roger moves on instinct to grab the line and adjust the sail without consciously thinking about what he’s doing. The ship is picking up speed, heading directly towards the cliffside, and Roger can only pray that _The Miracle_ lives up to her name.

“Brace yourselves!” John shouts, and Roger has just enough time to grab onto the mast, squeeze his eyes shut, and brace himself for another disastrous shipwreck as the prow of _The Miracle_ reaches the cliff.

But the crashing and splintering of wood that he was expecting never arrives.

A wave of energy washes over Roger as the wind abruptly dies down, and when Roger cautiously opens his eyes all he can do is stare around him in shock and wonder.

Brian was right. _The Miracle_ passed through an unseen doorway into a hidden sea that stretches on for leagues, far enough that if there’s a distant shore then Roger can’t see it. The sun is shining brightly overhead and the water is clear and calm around them, with flashes of color just below the surface catching Roger’s eye. When he peers over the side of the ship he realizes that the water is filled with mers, in a thousand colors and sizes and races, more than he’s ever seen in his entire life.

Brian laughs again but this time it sounds joyful. The echo is gone from his voice and when Roger looks at him his magic is already fading back away, and his once-again hazel eyes look around him in amazement.

“It’s the Heart of Rhye,” Brian breathes. “And it’s _alive_.”

Roger looks back at John, who’s staring around them with his mouth dropped open in stunned astonishment. He’s not even steering _The Miracle_ anymore, just letting the ship drift in the gentle currents. “I never… I never thought…” John says, fumbling to find the right words, _any_ words, in the face of the wonder that surrounds them.

Roger grins at him, wide and wild. He’s overwhelmed by this discovery and the events of the past few days, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or shout in joy. He always believed that Rhye was real and always hoped to find proof…. but he never thought he would find _this._ The lost kingdom is alive and her Heart is _thriving_. It’s everything that Freddie dreamed of finding and Roger only wishes that he was here to see it too.

“We did it,” Roger says. “John. _We did it!_ ”

But instead of the excited response he was expecting, Roger sees all of the color drain out of John’s face. He goes _white_ with absolute shock, a split-second before a new voice calls out from behind Roger, somewhere from the water in front of the ship.

“You did, darling, and it _certainly_ took you long enough!”


	8. The Reunion

Roger knows that voice. 

He knows what it sounds like laughing, and shouting, and singing. He’s heard it in sickness and in health, and he’s spent 25 years hearing it in his dreams, calling out over the dark water at night or in the waves lapping against the docks in the early hours of the morning. 

He’s hoped, with the impossible stubborn optimism of someone who cannot accept that the worst has already happened, that he would hear that voice again - but, truthfully, in the bottom of his heart, he knew that he never would. 

And hearing it now fills Roger with an unexpected surge of terror. He watches as John’s eyes fill with tears and a small, disbelieving smile starts to cross his face but Roger is rooted to the spot, unable to turn around and face the owner of the voice himself. He’s scared that it won’t be who he thinks it is, and also scared that it _will_ be and that once again his life will be torn upside down by someone that he’s always considered to be a brother. 

All he can is keep his eyes locked onto John as he chokes out, “John. Is it…?”

“It’s _Freddie_ ,” John breathes, and from behind Roger a much louder cry of _“Freddie!”_ comes from Brian, followed by the sound of loud splashing. 

John pushes past Roger, racing to the front of the ship. It takes several moments longer for Roger to pull himself together enough to even just turn around and he hovers in the background, away from the action at the bow of _The Miracle_ and in the water below.

Brian has jumped from the ship into the water. He's laughing and shouting and possibly crying, though it's hard to tell with the water droplets on his face as he resurfaces. The tentacles are gone and his normal tail is back, and Roger focuses on the way that it’s entwined with another mer’s tail, this new one white and black with striking gold patterns swirling down it’s length. 

Roger knows those patterns. He’s traced them with his fingers in his youth, during lazy summer days spent drifting aboard _The Rhapsody_ , days full of laughter and singing when the four of them would lie together on the deck and plan their next adventure, with hardly any cares in the world.

Roger’s eyes don’t want to focus on the other mer’s face. He sees instead the ways that Brian’s hands are gripping the mer’s shoulders tightly, as if he’s afraid that he will disappear if he lets go. He hears the questions shouted by both John and Brian - he can’t make out the exact words but he hears their joy and disbelief, hears the tears in John’s voice as he reaches the bow of the ship and stretches a hand out towards the water. He sees the mer reach back for John, and it’s in that moment that Roger finally allows himself to see Freddie. 

He doesn’t look like he did 25 years ago. He looks _younger_ , somehow. His face is no longer gaunt with illness and he’s grown his moustache back out. Roger had forgotten, somehow, how little it actually does to hide his overbite. It’s uncomfortable to realize that there are a lot of little things about Freddie that he seems to have forgotten. Roger held tightly to every memory of his friend that he could, but the years have dulled down some of the details - like the exact cadence of Freddie’s voice when he gets excited, and the warmth in his eyes when they lock onto Roger. 

“There you are, Blondie! I thought these two had left you behind, or else gotten sick of you and thrown you overboard!” Freddie calls out to him. The lighthearted teasing is so _familiar_ that it makes Roger’s heart twist painfully in his chest. “Though, there’s not much blond left in your hair these days, is there? You’ve all gone grey on me! I hardly recognized you at all!”

Freddie reaches out and flicks at one of Brian’s curls. Brian laughs and buries his face against Freddie’s neck, but Roger can still hear his response of, “Yes, well, that’s what _normally_ happens when you get old! Why haven’t _you_ aged at all?”

“Better yet, why are you here? _How_ are you here?” John asks as he wipes at his eyes. “You were so sick, we all thought you had died-”

“It’s all thanks to the magic of Rhye!” Freddie says. “It’s exactly like the legends said, the magic of the Heart protects everyone under its power!”

“There has to be more to it than that!” John says with a small laugh. 

Freddie laughs as well. “Well of course there is, darling! But it’s _such_ a long story, and-”

“So start telling it,” Roger says. His voice is quiet and flat, and when the others look back at him whatever they see on his face is enough to make their smiles start to fade.

“Rog, take it easy-” John starts, but Roger cuts him off quickly. 

“No. Not this time. Not now.” Roger’s terrified disbelief is quickly turning to anger. His heart is hammering in his chest and his vision is going unfocused at the edges, but his body feels completely _cold_. “How do we even know this is Freddie? I mean, we just saw what this magic did to Brian! How do we know that it’s not playing another trick on us?”

Doubt starts to creep into John’s and Brian’s expressions. “It’s _him_ ,” Brian insists, but he’s not as confident as he was a moment ago. “I’ve known Freddie the longest, I think I would know if this was a trick.”

“Not necessarily. Not after what this place just did to you,” Roger says to Brian, and to Freddie he adds, “Tell us something only Freddie Mercury would know.”

A seal pops up in the water next to Freddie on the opposite side from where Brian is still clinging to him. The creature nudges Freddie’s arm and wriggles his way underneath so he’s pressed against Freddie’s side as well. Brian gives the animal a curious look and the seal barks once at him. 

Sammy, still on _The Miracle_ , barks in response and races towards the front of the ship. John barely catches his dog before he can jump up on the railing to terrorize the seal - or worse, jump overboard altogether - and Freddie pats the seal’s back gently, as if trying to calm him down. 

“Easy, darling, you can’t blame them for wanting to be sure,” Freddie says, and it takes Roger a moment to realize that the words are directed to the _seal_ , of all things. “Let’s see, what I can tell you all to make you believe me…”

He taps one finger against his lips as he thinks and he looks so much like _Freddie_ that part of Roger wants to tell him to forget it, he believes him, everything is finally, _finally_ , alright again...

But if this is Freddie, if the impossible has now become a reality, then nothing is alright. 

Because that means Freddie has been _alive_ , for 25 years, and he didn’t-

“Brian, your father wanted you to have a better life than he did. He wanted you to use your magic to make a name for yourself, and he never really understood why you used it to help human “profiteers”, in his words, instead,” Freddie says at last. “And when I got sick you tried to use your defensive magic to heal me, even though you knew that it would never work.” 

“And John,” he continues as he turns towards the human. “You told me once that you wanted to be a shipbuilder, but you didn’t want to leave your mother and sister to travel to the city to get an apprenticeship. But every time there was a problem with _The Rhapsody_ you were there to help Roger put her to rights again. And Roger…”

Freddie locks eyes with Roger and he doesn’t want to hear what the mer has to say, but there’s no stopping him now. “When I first met you, I threw one of the shells from my necklace onto your ship, just to make sure you wouldn’t forget me,” he says, with a smile so bright that it hurts to look at. “And you didn’t hesitate to change the name of your ship to _The Rhapsody_ when I suggested it, but the first time I stole your penknife and carved into the deck you got _so_ angry at me!” He laughs and adds, “Honestly, I don’t blame you for finally getting a new ship and getting rid of all those scribbles of mine!”

“This ship belongs to John. _The Rhapsody_ sank in a storm while Brian and I were following the spell on this.” Roger pulls out the nautilus shell and throws it at Freddie, with a little more force than is necessary. “I kept that ship for 25 years, because those “scribbles” were the only thing you left behind when you decided to disappear without a word.”

Freddie’s mouth drops open in a small “o” of surprise and it’s John who says, a bit hesitantly, “Rog, I’m sure he has a reason for what he did-”

“Does he?” Roger asks, and to Freddie he says, “Do you? Do you have a reason for leaving and never coming back? Never even sending word that you were still alive? Or did you stop caring about us once you made it to your _precious_ Heart of Rhye?”

“ _Roger!_ ” Brian hisses. He clings tighter to Freddie, who seems to shrink under Roger’s anger. 

But years of grief have finally found their outlet and Roger doesn’t stop, _can’t_ stop, the torrent of words that pours out of him now. “We thought you were _dead_ , Freddie! You left and it broke us apart, and all we had left of you was my damn ship and whatever old treasure caches I could dig up but all we wanted was _you_ , back with us again! And I kept looking for you for _years_ , even though I knew you were dead, because I just wanted answers.”

There are tears streaming down Roger’s face now and he swipes at them angrily, hating that his hand shakes and hating that Freddie is looking at him like Roger is tearing his heart to shreds, when they’re the ones who have been living with broken hearts because of him for over two decades now. 

“Did you even _care_?” he asks through his tears. “Did you care how we would feel, when we woke up the morning after you left and realized you were gone? Or was it all a game to you? Disappearing and leaving that _fucking_ shell behind for us to find and not saying anything to us about what was going on? You found Rhye and left us behind and you didn’t even- you didn’t-”

Roger’s voice breaks and a moment later John is there, wrapping one arm around Roger’s shoulders and using his other hand to gently wipe the tears away from his face. Roger takes a deep breath and looks back at Freddie, who has tears welling up in his eyes as well, and seems to only be staying afloat because he’s still bracketed by Brian and the seal. 

“I have spent every day of the last 25 years missing you with my entire heart,” Roger tells him quietly. “And right now, I don’t know if you even thought about us at all.”

There’s a commotion in the water and suddenly where the seal had been there’s now a man, with a round face and a moustache like Freddie’s and a dark sealskin draped over his shoulders. “Oh, he thought about you alright!” the man says hotly. “All he’d do is talk about you three to anyone who’d listen, and most people who wouldn’t too!”

“Jim, lovie, settle down,” Freddie says quickly. 

And it clicks in Roger’s head who, exactly, this man - this _selkie_ \- is, just as Brian says, “Ah. Jim Hutton. It’s good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Jim says, in a tone of voice that suggests that he’s not _entirely_ happy to see them given the current conversation that’s happening.

There’s a moment of tense silence between everyone, between Roger who’s still mostly being held upright by John, and Freddie who’s being supported by Jim, and Brian in the water who’s caught between the two groups and doesn’t know who to turn to or what to do with himself. 

“He’s right, you know,” Freddie says at last, in a bit of a watery voice. “I never stopped thinking of you all and I’m so, _so_ sorry for the pain I put you through, my darlings. If I could have returned I would have. I would have gone back to you immediately and brought you here back here with me… but the magic of Rhye only works for those who stay in the Heart.”

“You couldn’t have sent someone at least?” Roger asks. He’s usually quick to anger, and quicker to forgive, but he’s holding his heart at a careful distance now, afraid of getting hurt again _just_ when he felt like he was finally starting to heal. 

Freddie laughs a little, but it’s entirely humorless. “There’s not many who leave the Heart, Rog. And none who do venture that far north. I would have sent Jim but…” He glances over at the selkie, who shrugs and gives a small nod. “Well, let’s just say he’s not in the best of health outside of here himself,” Freddie says. “I left my scrimshaw for you, and I thought you’d find it sooner-”

“So that _was_ yours!” Brian exclaims. “Freddie, the _spell_ on that thing-”

“The Heart showed me how to sing the enchantment onto the shell,” Freddie tells him. “You felt what the magic of the Heart can do-”

“Of _course_ ,” Brian says, eyes wide with understanding, though Roger and John exchange a look of complete confusion while the two mers are talking. 

“Not all of us know what this magic is or how it works, remember?” John calls out. “Can you start over, from the beginning maybe?”

“Right. Sorry.” Freddie shakes his head. “It _is_ a long story, though. So just… be patient with me? Please?”

The question is asked of all of them but it’s Roger alone that Freddie is looking at. Roger doesn’t feel guilty for his outburst, because those decades of grief and anger needed some sort of outlet after all of these years… but maybe he was quick to leap to judgement about Freddie’s actions. He owes his friend a chance to tell his story and he nods at Freddie, and sees the way that Freddie seems to relax slightly at even that simple of a response. 

“Alright. Well, I suppose I’d have to start at that night that I left, don’t I?” Freddie says, and there’s a distant look in his eyes now as he casts his memory back to that night. “I was sick. I was _so_ sick, and I heard- I heard you three talking. About what to do with my body, when I finally died.”

Roger remembers that night, and that conversation, all too well. John had wanted to bring Freddie ashore to bury and Brian had argued that he should be sunk to the depths of the ocean, as is the custom of mers. And Roger had been caught in the middle with a broken heart and a family falling to pieces, and he’d gone to bed early - and woke the following morning to find Freddie gone. 

None of them ever had any idea that Freddie had overheard every word they were saying, though.

“I couldn’t put you through having to make that decision,” Freddie continues. “I thought it would be kinder to leave but I didn’t have anything to use to write you a note, so I just… I hoped you’d understand, I suppose. That was wrong of me and I’ve spent every year since then regretting it.” 

His remorse rings out clear in his voice, and Jim presses a gentle kiss to his temple. Brian has moved away slightly, so he can better watch Freddie as he tells his story, but they still have their hands linked and Roger can see his thumb rubbing reassuringly along the back of Freddie’s hand. 

But no one, not even Brian, offers any words of comfort. No one tells him platitudes like, _That’s alright, it’s all in the past now_ , because the damage from Freddie’s leaving is still too heavy on them all, even if they’re beginning to understand why he did what he did. 

“I didn’t have a plan when I left. I thought I’d just swim until… Well, until I died, I suppose,” Freddie continues. “I didn’t set out with the idea of finding Rhye but once I heard the Song…”

“I still don’t understand that,” John says, when Freddie’s voice trails off and he doesn’t immediately continue that thought. “What is this Song? How does it work?”

“The Heart sings out to call her people home,” Roger says, without thinking. When everyone looks at him in surprise he huffs and adds, “That’s what the legends say, anyway. It has to be some sort of magic, right?”

“That’s exactly right,” Brian says. “It’s... a call, I suppose. A beacon of sorts. You hear it, and it guides you to the Heart. It makes you _want_ to find Rhye, above anything else.”

“It’s ancient siren magic, that’s how I recognized it when it was so faint that I thought I was imagining things. The Song is so old that it rarely has the power to reach even half as far north as we lived. That’s why we never heard it before, and it was pure chance that I heard it that day at all,” Freddie explains. “By the time I realized that it was real, I was too far away and too weak to return to you. But I was close enough to Boon Island, and I remembered that you, Roger, always talked about looking for treasure there, that I thought to leave a clue for you to follow. I carved the message into the shell with a rock, and the Heart showed me how to sing an echo of its Song to enchant it.”

“But the shell kept pointing us in different directions,” John interrupts. “And I’m fairly certain that Rhye has a fixed location.”

Freddie lets out a small huff of laughter, and he explains, “The spell has to point to a known location, but the Song only gives you a feeling to follow, not precise directions. I couldn’t tie my spell to the Song itself and I didn’t know where Rhye was yet, so I tied it to my own location instead. I thought I’d either live to find Rhye and you’d find me there, or…”

Or they would find Freddie’s body, and get their answers that way. There’s a chilling logic to Freddie’s actions, Roger can’t deny that. If they had only _known_ to look for the scrimshaw sooner, then maybe they could have been spared the pain of all these long years. 

“But how did you make it all the way here?” John asks. “If you were too weak to come home to us, how did you swim even further to reach Rhye?”

“I think I can answer that,” Brian says. “The Song, it- it _changes_ you. It compels you to follow it but it also affects your body. You don’t tire. You don’t feel hungry. All your thoughts are focused on reaching the Heart of Rhye.” He looks at Freddie and adds, “And it has healing properties too, doesn’t it?”

Freddie nods. “When you’re under the Song’s spell it will keep you alive and give you the strength you need to reach the Heart of Rhye. Once you’re inside the Heart it’s control disappears, but the magic still affects everything here. It can’t fix everything, of course, but it holds the worst of our sicknesses at bay.”

“And slows down the aging process too, I’d imagine,” John says. “If your appearance is anything to go by.”

“Yes, well…” Freddie ducks his head to hide the embarrassed flush that spreads across his face. It’s clear now that his earlier enthusiasm and teasing was only a front, and Roger wonders what he makes of the three of them finally arriving here only to be grizzled and grey and visibly worn by the passing years in a way that Freddie is not. 

It’s Jim who speaks next to continue the story where Freddie left off. “The Song is the only magic that extends beyond the Heart. Everything else was pulled back when the old kingdom fell. Anyone is free to leave but the magic will not follow you, and the Song only sings for those who don’t already know the way to Rhye.”

And with that simple statement, the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place without anything else needing to be said. “If you left, your sickness would return and you would die,” Brian says quietly. “You couldn’t return to us, because you never would have survived the journey back north.”

“I tried,” Freddie says, a little desperately, like he’s still not sure if they fully believe or understand him yet. “After a few years, when you hadn’t arrived yet and I was starting to feel better, I left to see if it was possible for me to reach you, but I didn’t make it very far before I fell deathly ill again. And I’ve asked _everyone_ who ever leaves the Heart if they would try to find you but none wanted to risk a journey that far north, especially after so much time had passed and I didn’t know if you were still alive-”

Freddie’s voice cracks and Roger can feel his walls crumbling as he realizes that Freddie hasn’t been living an entirely carefree life in this supposed utopia, like Roger originally assumed. 

The pain of Freddie’s disappearance, and the assumption that he had died, left its scars on the three of them - but at least they knew he was gone. At least they knew that they would never see him again. Freddie has spent 25 years clinging to the hope that he’d see them again, but never knowing if he would - just knowing that with every passing year the odds of them reaching Rhye got slimmer and slimmer…

“I didn’t know it would take you this long to find my scrimshaw or I would have done something else, I swear,” Freddie says, as a tear starts to roll down his cheek. Jim gently brushes it aside but Freddie hardly seems to even notice. “This was never a game to me. You always talked about finding a way to search Boon Island for treasure even though it was mostly just rock, so I thought it would be easy for you to find it…”

“The only reason I didn’t search there is because you left,” Roger chokes out. “Without you around we all followed our own pursuits, and treasure hunting became just a means to an end again. There was no reason for me to go through the effort of searching on Boon Island, until I ran out of any other leads.”

Freddie’s hand flies up to cover his mouth, but it does little to mask the sob that escapes. “I’m so sorry. Darlings, I’m so, _so_ sorry. I’m sorry I left like I did and caused you so much pain, and sorry that I couldn’t find some way to send word to you and-”

“No,” Roger cuts in. “God, Freddie…” He stumbles forward out of John’s embrace, until he’s leaning over the front railing so he can see and talk to Freddie properly. “ _I’m_ sorry, for everything I said earlier. I’m sorry that I accused you of only thinking of yourself. I’m sorry I didn’t find your scrimshaw sooner and that we left you alone for so many years.”

Freddie is already shaking his head, and shaking off Jim and Brian’s hands. He swims closer to the ship and Roger, without thinking, jumps overboard to meet him. 

Roger goes under the water and has a small moment of panic at being submerged, even though there’s no storm and he’s not drowning and it’s only a second before he breaks the surface again. And then none of that matters because _Freddie_ is there and he flings his arms around Roger, and Roger clings back to him as tight as he can. They’re both crying and both talking over each other through their tears, half-formed sentences of _I’m sorry_ and _I missed you_ and _You’re here, you’re finally here_. 

There’s another splash as John follows Roger overboard and then he’s there as well, holding onto whatever part of Freddie he can reach, and Brian joins them a second later, his long arms wrapping around them all and helping keep the humans afloat. Sammy is barking wildly aboard the ship, and Jim is laughing in the background, and it’s everything that Roger has yearned for for the last 25 years. It feels impossible that this is real, that Freddie is here and _alive_ , that after so much pain and heartbreak that they finally get to have this now. 

It’s John who voices the question that has been circling around Roger’s thoughts, but that he was too afraid to put into words. “What happens now?”

“You stay. Please tell me you’ll stay.” Freddie looks up at them and there’s still tears in his eyes, and now a hint of uncertain worry as well. “That is, if you want to. I know you probably have lives and families that you left behind…”

“My family is right here,” Roger says. “The only other thing I had in my life was _The_ _Rhapsody_ , and she’s at the bottom of the ocean now.”

“So you won’t leave?” Freddie asks, tentative but tinged with hope nonetheless. 

Roger laughs and squeezes Freddie’s shoulders. “You couldn’t get me to leave now even if you wanted to!”

Freddie is smiling now as he turns to the others and asks, “Brian? John?”

Roger finds himself holding his breath as he waits for their answers. Brian was called to Rhye by the Song but he built a life for himself as the silent protector of the sea creatures in his cove, and John had been so resistant to leaving his lighthouse in the first place that Roger doesn’t know if he’ll want to give it up forever.

Would they want to stay as well, or has Roger found Freddie only to lose his two other friends now?

Luckily, it seems that his fears are unfounded because Brian laughs and says, “Why on earth would I want to ever leave?”

And John, with a wry smile, points out, “They don’t need me back at the lighthouse. The town wanted me to retire, and they’ve probably already moved someone else in by now anyway.”

“ _Lighthouse_?” Freddie echoes, intrigued. “There’s a story there!”

“There is, and I’m sure you’ll hear it eventually,” John says mildly, neatly sidestepping around the ugly truth that the story of why he became a lighthouse keeper is also tainted with grief over Freddie’s disappearance. “But more importantly… Well, Rog and I aren’t mers, Freddie. Are you sure we’re allowed to stay?”

“Rhye has a bit of a lax definition of “mer” these days,” Jim tells them. “There’s all manner of sea witches here, and undines, and selkies like myself…”

“And humans as well?” Roger asks. Now that the issue has been raised he needs to know, beyond any doubt, that he’ll be able to build and _keep_ a new life for himself here. 

“A few,” Jim says. He adjusts his sealcoat around his shoulders and adds, “Humans can’t find Rhye unless they’re shown the way by a mer, but once they’re here they’re generally welcomed and the Heart’s magic works on them as well. And besides, after how much Freddie has talked about you I think most of the inhabitants of Rhye will just be glad that you’re here so he’ll finally shut up.”

Freddie laughs again and swats at Jim, but he doesn’t deny that what the selkie is saying is true. Instead he just adds, “Honestly, you can stay and you can do anything you want now. Settle down, or explore Rhye, or study her magic and history… At some point you’ll want to meet Miami-”

“Jim Beach, the current Steward of Rhye,” Jim explains, before any of them can ask who Freddie is talking about. 

“-but beyond that, well, the sky’s the limit, lovies!” Freddie finishes triumphantly. 

“What about you?” Brian asks Freddie. “What have you spent all this time doing?”

“A little of this, a little of that, but mostly…” Freddie shrugs, and his smile fades into something a little more bittersweet. “Mostly waiting for you.” He chuckles and nuzzles against Roger, who’s still the closest to him, and adds, “Whatever happens now, I don’t care. If you want to sail across Rhye, I’ll follow you. If you want to build cottages along the coast, I’ll decorate them with the most beautiful shells and treasures I can find. You’re finally _here_. I don’t care about anything else.”

And Roger finds that, for the first time in 25 years, he doesn’t particularly care what happens next himself. As long as he gets to stay in Rhye, as long as he has Freddie, John, and Brian by his side again, that’s already more than enough for him. 


	9. Epilogue - The Heart

_Six months later…_

It’s late, and Roger can’t sleep - but that still isn’t anything unusual.

He’s still adjusting to living on land, rather than on his ship. After years spent at sea he liked the idea of putting down permanent roots somewhere for the first time in his life, particularly since he still feels moments of fear when he thinks about being caught in a storm or falling overboard. He knows that he’s safe in Rhye, where supposedly storms are rare and the seas are almost always calm, but his near-drowning left scars that he’s still trying to heal from. 

That’s not the only thing that’s left its mark, though, because it’s not the feeling of being on dry land that’s keeping Roger awake tonight but rather the nightmares. Nightmares that they didn’t find Rhye at all, or that they arrived to find Freddie long since dead. Nightmares where he wakes up to find himself back north aboard _The Rhapsody_ , these past months in Rhye nothing more than a fantasy, and the grief of losing Freddie all over again cuts through him like a knife. 

Or sometimes, he’ll instead dream that the magic of the Heart took Brian and left him as that monstrous kraken and never gave him back to them. Or that _The Miracle_ crashed into the side of the cliff and Roger has to watch John and Sammy drown, before the water swallows him alive as well. No matter the subject, they never seem to stop and Roger can hardly close his eyes without some terror waiting to unleash itself while he sleeps.

It helps, a little, knowing that he’s not the only one plagued by horrific dreams. They’re all suffering from nightmares as they heal, John and Brian and Freddie alike, and as Roger slips out of bed he knows where to find his friends. 

The first part of his new house that had Roger finished is a large porch that sweeps out over the water, with a few low submerged seats where Brian and Freddie can swim up to visit without having to pull themselves up on land. Freddie has a proper home far below the waves where he lives with Jim and several friends - and now Brian as well, at least while he gets settled - but they both spend most of their time at the surface with Roger and John, like they did in their youth.

It’s out here that Roger finds Freddie. Tonight he has pulled himself up out of the water and he’s hard at work carving out a familiar design into the wood. Freddie had declared that he’d make Roger’s new house more glorious than _The Rhapsody_ ever was and he seems intent to keep that promise, starting with a large version of their crest carved into the center of the porch.

He looks up as Roger steps outside and offers him a gentle smile. “Can’t sleep?” he asks, even though it’s obvious that that’s the case. 

Roger nods. “Yeah. You know how it is.” 

And Freddie nods as well, because he does understand. The four of them have spent enough time talking over the last few months that there are hardly any secrets left between any of them. Freddie has shared with them not only his knowledge of Rhye, it’s history and it’s magic and what life is like here, but also what the past 25 years have been like without them. And they’ve shared their lives with him, every story from their separate paths that Freddie missed, and some details that they hadn’t ever even shared with each other. 

“Where’s Brian?” Roger asks Freddie. The only other person he can see is Jim, who’s asleep on the far end of the porch in his seal form. He’s never far from Freddie’s side, and although Roger is glad that Freddie isn’t out here alone in the late hours of the evening he feels a twinge of disappointment that no one else seems to be around.

“Still studying,” Freddie says. “I keep telling him that he doesn’t have to rush to learn everything about his magic all at once, but he doesn’t listen to me.”

Roger joins Freddie on the floor. His joints don’t ache when he sits anymore, even though he’s only been in Rhye a few months. He’s not likely to ever _look_ as young as Freddie still does, but he certainly doesn’t _feel_ his age these days and he’s grateful that the aches of old age are largely gone - even if Freddie still likes to tease them about their appearances. 

_“Three old hags,”_ he calls them with a mischievous smile, and Brian will correct him, _“Four aging Queens, I think you mean_.”

But Roger isn’t really thinking about his age or his appearance at the moment, and he tells Freddie, “Brian’s just excited still. All he’s ever wanted was to have a proper teacher, and now that his magic has come back he’s got dozens willing to help him out.”

What Roger and John didn’t realize, during those horrifying days when the Song had an iron grip on their friend, was that Brian had been fighting it to stay with _The Miracle_ even as the magic tried to urge him to return to the ocean and swim off on his own. Fighting the Song is almost unheard of, and the strain of that almost cost Brian his magic entirely. It had taken weeks before his abilities had started to return, and now Brian has been spending almost every waking minute strengthening them and learning more under the careful guidance of other sea witches. 

Freddie _hmph_ ’s a little, but he’s not really annoyed by Brian’s absence. None of them are, not when they all know how important these studies are to him. “Where’s John? Still out sailing?” Freddie asks Roger instead.

“Must be, he didn’t come home tonight,” Roger says. In an ironic turn of events, John decided that, after spending years living in isolation, he would be the first of them to properly explore their new home, and it’s now Roger’s cottage that he returns to when he’s not out sailing with Sammy. 

It had been hard, at first, to let John and Brian leave to do their own things again, but they’re never apart for longer than a day or two. And every time that Brian and John come back to Roger he relaxes a little bit more, until he’s almost not bothered by their absence at all. 

That’s not quite true with Freddie, though, not yet, and Roger still feels a bit guilty that the mer is pulled in so many different directions - out to sea with John, and to the depths with Brian, and back to Roger’s home at the end of the day, no matter where the others are. 

It’s been hard to let go of his grief and anger and fear, but it’s been much harder to let go of his guilt.

Freddie, sensing this, sets aside his knife and opens his arms, and with a small sigh Roger moves into his embrace. Hugs from Freddie still feel like coming home, and Roger is slowly starting to accept that he won’t have to lose this ever again. 

“Was it particularly bad tonight, dear?” Freddie asks quietly. 

“No worse than usual,” Roger tells him. “I’m just getting sick of it. I’d like to get one good night of sleep, for once.”

“Yes, well, I’d have to agree with you on that,” Freddie says with a sigh of his own. “But we’ll get there. Just give it time. We have plenty of that now, after all.”

So Roger has been told, a thousand times over, by Freddie and Jim, as well as Phoebe and Joe - two mers that live with them in Freddie’s home beneath the sea. Even Miami, the kelpie Steward with a dry sense of humor and a genuine fondness for Freddie and his friends, had reassured them that they didn’t have to worry about their age anymore. _Time works differently in Rhye_ , they all said. _You have forever now, if you want it._

Roger isn’t sure that he trusts in forever - but he trusts in Freddie. He’s always trusted in Freddie and maybe, for now, that can be enough. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Roger says, with a loud yawn halfway through the sentence. “And don’t tell me that I need to go to sleep. I’m not going back inside.”

“Then stay outside then,” Freddie suggests. “I’m probably spending the night here myself, since Jim seems to have gotten himself settled in. Just grab a blanket and come back.”

Roger thinks about that for half a second, before relenting, “Alright. Yeah, I can do that.”

He grabs a blanket and pillow off the guest bed - John’s bed - because it’s closer than his own, and on his way back outside he pauses to glance at the shelf by the door. On it rests a single object - the nautilus shell that led them to Freddie. It’s spell is silent now, and it’s etchings remain unfinished, but it will forever hold a place of honor in Roger’s home, along with the original flag rescued from _The Rhapsody_ which now hangs on the wall behind the shelf. 

Freddie is already settling into the water near where Jim is sleeping as Roger lies down further back from the edge of the porch. A year ago, if Roger had tried to sleep on the hard deck of _The Rhapsody_ he wouldn’t have been able to walk in the morning, but he’s no longer really worried about what state his back will be in when he wakes up - though, as his eyes slip shut, he makes a mental note to add a few hammocks out here in the morning anyway.

“Goodnight, Rog,” Freddie calls out quietly. 

“‘night,” Roger mumbles back, as he starts to drift off.

He doesn’t quite manage to fall asleep, though, before the sound of quiet splashing draws his attention. He cracks one bleary eye open to see Brian leaning on the edge of the porch near Freddie and talking quietly to him. 

“...alright?” Roger just barely manages to hear Brian ask. 

“Another nightmare,” Freddie whispers back. “But he’ll be fine. We all will be, eventually.”

“And how are you doing?” Brian asks. 

He hears the sound of a tail swishing through the water, though Roger can’t quite tell which of the two mers it belongs to.

“Better up here, rather than below,” Freddie says. “You?”

“The same,” Brian says. “I think John’s on his way back too. Someone told me they saw _The Funk_ heading this way.”

Roger hears Freddie laugh quietly. “You have _got_ to stop calling his ship that, darling, or one day he actually will snap!”

Brian chuckles but his response doesn’t reach Roger’s ears. He stops focusing on their conversation and lets the quiet murmur of their voices wash over him, warm and familiar, and he drifts off to sleep feeling safe at home with his friends. 

Roger wakes late the following morning to the sound of snoring. It’s from John, who had indeed returned sometime during the night - and had stolen the bedding off of Roger’s bed to join them on the porch. That’s fair enough, since Roger had stolen John’s blanket first, and he drapes it over John’s sleeping form now. Sammy cracks open one eye as Roger walks by, but settles back down next to John easily enough.

Brian is asleep in the water, curled up in one of the submerged seats, with his head resting on his arms on the edge of the porch. It doesn’t look too comfortable to Roger but Brian is somehow sleeping soundly; he doesn't stir at all as Roger kneels down next to him and brushes his hair out of his face to check on him.

Jim is gone already, but Freddie is still near the far end of the porch. He has a large conch shell in one hand and a knife in the other, and he stops his carving as Roger walks over to sit down next to him.

“Sleep well?” Freddie asks. 

Roger nods, and stifles a yawn as he says, “Better once I was out here. Were you leaving?”

“I was going to, yes,” Freddie says. Roger looks down at the shell to see that Freddie had been halfway through carving a note. _Breakfast. Will be back-_

Because Freddie never leaves without telling them where he’s going, either in person or through a note. Not even if he’s certain that he’ll be back before they have a chance to notice that he’s gone.

“We have to get paper or something for you to use instead of carving messages into shells all the time,” Roger says. The mers have little use for paper, since most of them live exclusively under water, but Roger’s met some of the other humans who call Rhye home. Over the years - or centuries, in some cases - they’ve managed to build respectable lives for themselves here, with as many human comforts as they can acquire or reproduce on their own.

One sailor in particular, who goes by the nickname “Crystal”, quickly became a friend of Roger’s and has been unbelievably helpful in getting him various odds and ends. If anyone in Rhye would know where to find paper, it would be him. 

Freddie, however, doesn’t seem to mind his more laborious way of leaving messages. “Oh, don’t bother about the paper, darling, half the time one of you wakes up before I finish anyway and that’s never a bad thing.” He sets the shell and knife aside and stretches out. “I was just going to swim down and grab some breakfast for us all. Though, now that you’re up…”

His voice trails off in questioning tone, though Roger knows what he’s asking without it needing to be said. “Stay here with me?” Roger says. “At least until the others wake up.”

“Alright,” Freddie agrees, without hesitation, as Roger knew that he would. The mer still has moments of doubting that they want him around, which don’t always mesh well with Roger’s guilty feelings that he’s taking up too much of Freddie’s time - but they’re slowly learning how to work with each other’s needs. 

They’re all still healing, in their own ways, but every day things get a little bit better than the day before. And every day the quiet moments between them get a little bit more comfortable as well. 

“I should make tea eventually,” Roger says after a few minutes. “John and Brian will want some when they wake up.” Roger still isn’t quite sold on the seaweed-based tea that Crystal introduced them too, but he’s happy enough to make it for his friends. 

Freddie waves one hand dismissively. “Let them get their own tea. It’s a beautiful day, dear. The sun is shining and I feel good, so…”

Freddie’s voice trails off and Roger glances over at him in amused curiosity. “So…?”

“That sounds like the beginnings of a good song there, doesn’t it?” Freddie’s original point is clearly derailed by the moment of inspiration. He hums a bit of a melody and asks, “What do you think, Rog?”

“It does sound good,” Roger says with an easy grin. “Want to work on that later?”

“Mm, maybe.” Freddie stretches out with a wide yawn, and settles back into the water with his shoulder bumping against Roger’s leg. “We have the whole day ahead of us, darling. Let’s just see where it takes us.”

Roger takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and looks out across the not-so-lost Heart of Rhye. There’s a ship on the horizon, and selkies lounging on distant rocks, and the occasional bright flash of a mer tail as it flips out of the water. And behind him Roger can hear the quiet sounds of John starting to stir behind him, and Brian will wake up soon enough as well. 

His nightmare from the previous evening seems like a distant memory now, and all Roger feels is excitement for what the day ahead holds - what the _future_ holds - and what adventure the four of them will find next.

After all, they have the whole day ahead of them - and if the stories are to believed, all the time in the world as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I'm not the greatest at responding to comments but please know that I love and appreciate every single one of them ♥ I've had such joy working on this fic and I could not be more thrilled with the response it's gotten. Thank you all so, so much!


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